Milton's Ovidian Eve

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve

Mandy Green


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Mandy Green Durham University, UK

© Mandy Green 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Mandy Green has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Green, Mandy Milton’s Ovidian Eve 1. Eve (Biblical figure) – In literature 2. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D. Metamorphoses 3. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost I. Title 821.4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Mandy. Milton’s Ovidian Eve / by Mandy Green. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6666-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7546-9348-2 (ebook) 1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 2. Eve (Biblical figure)—In literature. 3. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D. Metamorphoses. 4. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.—Influence. I. Title. PR3562.G74 2009 821’.4—dc22 ISBN 9780754666660 (hbk) ISBN 9780754693482 (ebk.V)

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Contents Foreword Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction

vii xii xiii 1

1 “The Fairer Image”: Reflections of Narcissus and Pygmalion’s Ivory Maid

23

2 Daphne and the Issue of Consent

53

3 Maiden, Bride and Mother: Three Faces of Eve

77

4 “Goddess Humane”: Eve as Venus, Queen of the Graces

99

5 “The Vine and Her Elm”: A Marriage Made in Paradise

123

6 “Access Deni’d”: The Virgin in the Garden

149

7 “Softening the Stony”: Eve and the Process of Spiritual Regeneration

181

Afterword

209

Works Cited Index

213 229


Foreword Given his array of disguises and final enforced transformation into a serpent, Satan would evidently seem the most obviously Ovidian character in Paradise Lost, yet it is Eve who is more vitally quickened to life through a succession of metamorphic moments and is arguably the more profoundly Ovidian of the two. These metamorphic moments, when one mythological figuration melts effortlessly into another, generate an exciting sense of dynamic provisionality about Eve; they become a way of enacting or expressing subtly shifting states of mind and feeling, imparting a sense of psychological depth and authenticity to her responses, which are always in process, moment by moment, rather than fixed and formulated from the outset. The main aim of this study is to reassess the nature of the Ovidian presence in Paradise Lost. I shall demonstrate how Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses – not least Ovid’s own central metaphor of continuous transformation – to create a subtly evolving portrait of Eve, a multifaceted and intriguing figure of hidden depths. The book proceeds by a series of unfolding explorations of Eve, examining her alignment with a range of mythological figures from a number of different vantage points. A study of Paradise Lost’s complex interplay with the Metamorphoses enhances an appreciation of Milton’s richly textured verse and affects our reading of crucial, defining moments in the narrative. Strategies of allusion, conflicting perspectives and emblematic landscapes are all deployed by Milton in a complex, multilayered creation that challenges preconditioned responses to the poem, which have derived from easy suppositions about Milton’s attitude to women, pagan mythology and Ovid himself. This study thus stands at the intersection of a number of seventeenthcentury cultural contexts and discourses, most notably, gender relations and intertextuality, and is frequently in dialogue with the insights and methods of other critics to clarify the precise nature of my own critical response. (These discussions are supported by extensive notes, which will enable the reader to pursue these ongoing critical debates in greater depth.) My approach is inevitably indebted to the recent body of work on influence. Richard DuRocher has helpfully distinguished three general approaches to influence characterized by the chief metaphor employed in each case: “influence as anxiety (Bloom); influence as illumination (Wittreich); and influence as dialogue (Greene)” (30) to which we may add DuRocher’s own preferred image for “Milton’s relation to Ovid” as “an agon between two poetic champions” (9), There has been a wealth of valuable material published on both Milton and Ovid during the past few decades to which I am indebted; however, only those works cited in this study can be included in the bibliography.


viii

though one undertaken in “a spirit of admiring antagonism” (35). In my readings, where the interplay between Milton’s Ovidian legacy and the originality of his representation of Eve is productive not so much of anxiety and antagonism, but of acknowledgment and admiration, metamorphosis most adequately describes the way in which what Ovid wrote is imaginatively absorbed by Milton and transformed into something different, with the new creation nevertheless retaining some essential quality of the old. I would like to argue that in many of these Ovidian moments there is purposeful allusion to a pre-text in the Metamorphoses, which is actively and deliberately brought into play by Milton. The element of play in allusion (from the Latin alludere, to play with or against) suggests, as William Porter has perceptively observed, “a more amiable, more polite, more civilized relationship” than many other models of literary influence that have been proposed, “a rivalry perhaps, but one that has achieved equilibrium” (32). One of the primary purposes of this book is thus to offer a fresh account of poetic influence: to understand it as the product of creative reading and to regard the poem as a place where the finest, most alert and nuanced readings take place. The critical method that issues from such a standpoint is a mode of close reading that pays careful attention to the unique achievement of Ovid and Milton as well as to the creative interchange between them. By virtue of these close engagements with key passages from both poets, I aim to make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of Ovid as well as of Milton’s own creatively responsive poetic imagination. As both poets are highly self-conscious artists who are drawn again and again to certain thematic preoccupations, I shall be examining significant examples of intratextuality as well as intertextuality. Milton’s complex poetic method exacts from the reader a response of openness and flexibility that allows for a plurality of possibilities at any one time. A literary study of this kind cannot, of course, enjoy the same flexibility as verse and suffers the constraints of linear progression. While the argument develops a cumulative significance, it is not progressive in a linear fashion and does not readily lend itself to simple prose paraphrase. Since it is impossible to adopt a number of vantage points simultaneously, each chapter will focus on a different aspect of Eve’s mythological figurations so that we can appreciate her as a figure fully in the round. Such an approach is necessary at the level of the line of verse as well as in the larger figurations of structure and form. Milton’s richly textured verse is a medium that can hold in solution a wealth of possibilities; certain key passages from Paradise Lost must be visited more than once in order to release the full range of meaning inherent in the lines. Ovid was to remain a significant imaginative presence informing Milton’s work from his early Latin elegies to Paradise Lost, the great achievement of his

So when Daphne is changed to laurel, her shining beauty still remains (Met. I.552). Unfortunately, Porter does not elaborate upon this valuable insight since his principal concern is to defend Milton’s classical pre-texts, and Virgil in particular, against what he considers to be the “insolence” of Milton’s treatment of them (82).

Foreword

ix

poetic maturity. In Elegia prima the youthful poet had represented himself as being caught between conflicting modes of life: literary pursuits and girl-watching (otia grata, “the delights of leisure-time,” El. I.18) are suddenly perceived as a tempting distraction from the rigours of his studies at Cambridge and hastily abandoned. In Tetrachordon the mature Milton had a different view: he now recognized such relaxation to be not only harmless, but essential to the husbanding of intellectual energies, for him as for all serious-minded individuals: No mortall nature can endure either in the actions of Religion, or study of wisdome, without somtime slackning the cords of intense thought and labour ... We cannot therefore alwayes be contemplative, or pragmaticall abroad, but have need of som delightfull intermissions, wherin the enlarg’d soul may leav off a while her severe schooling; and like a glad youth in wandring vacancy, may keep her hollidaies to joy and harmles pastime. (Col. 4.85–6)

Just as in an Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton had remembered the pleasure of reading Ovid’s elegiac poetry as being his favourite pastime years before, when “no recreation came to me better welcome” (Col. 3.i.302), now the soft ease of female companionship is likened to a schoolboy’s holiday from his “severe schooling.” While Milton would have judged the stylistic brilliance of the text of the Metamorphoses to be, like Eve herself, “in outward shew / Elaborate, of inward less exact” (VIII.538–9), such literary otium was nevertheless a necessary refreshment for him, like the otium of marriage.

All quotations from Milton’s prose works are taken from the Columbia edition edited by F. A. Patterson. Like so many students of Milton, I remain indebted to the richly informative notes of Alaistair Fowler’s edition of Paradise Lost, particularly those of the first edition. All quotations from Milton’s poetical works are, however, taken from The Riverside Milton edited by Roy Flannagan. I have preferred this edition because the unmodernized spelling of the 1674 text of Paradise Lost releases the etymological force of many verbal puns that would otherwise go unnoticed (after Death’s sexual assault, for example, Sin is left “dismaid,” II.792), and discloses the substantial quality of concepts like Beauty and Grace more than a modern edition with lighter capitalization would do. Although Milton famously identified himself with the fate of Orpheus, his song unheeded by a hostile audience (VII.32–8), he was not in sympathy with the latter’s avoidance of the female sex, which, according to George Sandys’ sanitized account, was owing to their being “a hinderance to the study of philosophy, & administration of civill affairs” (519). (For a more detailed account of Sandys’ comprehensive commentary on the Metamorphoses, see 7–8.) Otia grata is no longer simply contrasted with durus labor (“hard work”); they are both perceived as complementary phases of the same creative rhythm. Looking forward to Samson Agonistes, Milton’s position had hardened, and the female sex is decried as a beautiful decorative surface that lacks depth: so much attention had been lavished on “such outward ornament” that “inward gifts / Were left for hast unfinish’t” (1025, 1026–7).


When writing Paradise Lost, Milton embraced both the Metamorphoses and the Bible; the imaginative truth of pagan myth and the literal truth of Genesis; soft, sensuous beauty and Old Testament austerity. In this poem where neither side is divorced from the other, the tension is productive, a source of combined strength rather than divisive weakness (discors concordia apta est, Met. I.433). The marriage of Adam and Eve may be regarded as the fruit and symbol of the wedding of these two divergent aspects of Milton’s creative genius and their collaboration in the poem. Indeed, an insight of this kind lies beneath Christopher Ricks’ conclusion that, “At its very best, Milton’s style is remarkable for its simultaneous combination of what is energetically strong with what is winning soft and amiably mild” (148). Thomas De Quincey once suggestively likened the lasting bond between Milton and Ovid to “the wedding of male and female counterparts,” but then developed the image to describe an attraction of opposites in which Ovid’s “festal gaiety, and the brilliant velocity of his aurora borealis intellect form[ed] a deep, natural equipoise to the mighty gloom and solemn planetary movement in the mind of the other” (449). In a comparable vein, E. K. Rand assured us that Ovid’s early influence served to soften Milton’s own natural Puritan asceticism: Milton’s mind was naturally stern, simple, intense, tenacious of purpose, contemptuous of show. Oh happy the day when he became apprentice to the gayest of [the] ancient poets ... On Milton’s temperament Ovid had undoubtedly a limbering effect ... Who would not shudder to think what the world might have lost had not Ovid tempered his youth. (1922, 132–3)

More recently, DuRocher, while still allowing for a strongly positive dimension to Milton’s “dialectical imitation” of Ovid, has defined the relationship as primarily “combative” in character (36–7), epitomized in his memorable image of an “agon between two poetic champions” (9). More recently still, Elizabeth Sauer, while acknowledging the intensity of Milton’s continuing relationship with Ovid, has also, like DuRocher, seen it in terms of a struggle, but one in which “Milton engages his Ovidian, feminine side in order to renounce it and cultivate his

Unfortunately, it is not possible to specify which edition(s) of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Milton used. However, in his scholarly edition of Ovid’s poem, William S. Anderson gives an authoritative account of the transmission of the text, and in his Conspectvs Editionvm he lists the important editions that would have been available to Milton including: Raphael Regius, Venetiae 1493; Andreas Naugerius, edition Aldina, Venetiae 1517; Daniel Heinsius, Lugduni Batavorum 1629; and Nicolaus Heinsius, Amstelodami 1652. Quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses are taken from Anderson’s edition which is based on the 1652 Heinsius edition, “the best available text in Milton’s day” (DuRocher, note 3, 18); all other Latin quotations from Ovid’s works are taken from the six volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. All translations from the Latin poetry of Ovid and Milton are by me unless otherwise stated.

Foreword

xi

masculinity” (208). However, this epic in fact closes not on a note of rejection and repudiation but one of inclusion, even redemption. As Grantham Turner astutely concluded, “For all his suprematism, Milton has always been concerned with redeeming the ‘soft’ and the ‘sensuous’” (307). Indeed, just as by the epic’s conclusion the “female” virtues have been isolated as paradigmatic for the new Christian heroism, so too, the Ovidian myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha’s re-creation of the human race through the miraculous softening of stones has become a valid pagan prefiguration of Christian regeneration. Milton’s poetic fusion of scriptural fact with pagan fiction does not simply establish the ontological superiority of Christian substance over pagan shadow, but discovers the fragments of truth to be found in myth itself. Finally, and above all else, this book establishes that Milton’s reading of Ovid was central to the success of his mature poetic style and imaginative understanding, as embodied in the fairest of his creations, Eve. Mandy Green University of Durham

Milton’s poetic presence in Paradise Lost cannot be circumscribed within such a narrowly conventional understanding of gender. Even as a student, Milton had openly challenged commonplace criteria of masculinity, singling out for contempt binge-drinking and whoring, amongst other supposed proofs of virility. Alluding to his soubriquet, “the Lady of Christ’s,” Milton recalled how the renowned orator Hortensius had reacted when his manhood had been called into question with a similar jibe to imply that he too would rather be feminized in this way than be thought of as “a man without taste, culture or urbanity” (Flannagan, 865; Sixth Prolusion, Col. 12.242).

Acknowledgements Much of the spade-work for this book was done many years ago in the course of research for my doctoral thesis. First and foremost, I should like to take this opportunity to thank David Crane not only for his generous-spirited and meticulous supervision, but also for his unstinting support over the years, intellectual, practical and emotional. I should also like to record my thanks to Charles Martindale, Gordon Campbell, Richard DuRocher and Roy Flannagan who took time from their scholarly pursuits to offer advice and encouragement, and to Erika Gaffney for her continuing faith in the project. Colleagues and friends at Durham have been supportive in many ways, but in particular I would like to thank Michael O’Neill for all his support and guidance, especially for his unfailing readiness to listen and help. I am very grateful to Julie Crane for her close and attentive reading of the entire manuscript in draft and for joining me in a GNI whenever my spirits were flagging. I am also indebted to Mathew Sebastian for some judicious and inspired editing that helped me to transform a series of chapters into a book. My thanks go to the University of Durham for granting me research terms in 2004 and 2006 without which this book would still be unfinished. I am grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association for their kind permission to include material previously published in MLR and to Milton Quarterly for material published in that journal. Chapter 5 draws on “‘The Vine and Her Elm’: Milton’s Eve and the Transformation of an Ovidian Motif,” MLR 91 (1996): 301–16, and Chapter 7 is based on “Softening the Stony: Deucalion, Pyrrha and the Process of Regeneration in Paradise Lost,” MQ 35 (2001): 9–21. I have also incorporated some material from “The Virgin in the Garden: Milton’s Ovidian Eve,” MLR 100 (2005): 903–22. I should also like to express heartfelt thanks to Gillian Boughton and Helen Bomgardner for giving me the opportunity to live at Dale Crest – its tranquil atmosphere, open aspect and beautiful garden, “tending to wild,” created ideal conditions for tackling the final stages of the book. My final thanks should go to my three children: Rosie for her cheerful companionship, patience and understanding during long days at the computer; David for his good-humour, kindly support and encouragement; and to Eve herself who kept the idea of the book alive.

List of Abbreviations Abbreviated titles: Milton’s works El Elegia Comus A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle PR Paradise Regained SA Samson Agonistes An Apology for Smectymnuus An Apology Against a Pamphlet call’d A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus Church-Government The Reason of Church-Government Urg’d Against Prelaty DDC De Doctrina Christiana DDD Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Col. The Columbia Edition of The Works of John Milton Abbreviated titles: journals and periodicals ELH MLN MLR MQ MS PQ

A Journal of English Literary History Modern Language Notes Modern Language Review Milton Quarterly Milton Studies Philological Quarterly

In addition, certain standard abbreviations for books of the Bible and classical works have been used.


Introduction “Ovid, the good natured libertine” and “favourite poet of our great Puritan” (Leigh Hunt, London Journal I.81)

I The portrait of Milton that we glimpse in modern scholarship has softened considerably and developed in complexity away from the simple, monolithic image of an inflexible, austere and authoritarian Puritan, English literature’s “patriarchal shibboleth.” Yet many readers would still feel some consternation, embarrassment or scepticism at the suggestion of an enduring association between Milton and Ovid, the lightest and most softly sensuous of the Augustan poets. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century those readers who recognized some form of literary relationship between Milton and Ovid had tended to dismiss it as an unfortunate boyish excess only evident in his Latin verses and fortunately of short duration. More recent studies have tended to probe the cracks that run through this monolithic figure, finding evidence of doubleness and division where before was unity and coherence. The “Milton” that emerged in the last century had a deeply “divided sensibility”: aspects of his temperament were found to be fundamentally antagonistic to one another. This clash of opposing principles was most often powerfully polarized around Milton’s love of beauty on the one hand and his Puritan disdain of it on the other. Since this basic dichotomy assumes many different but related forms, even some acknowledgement of Milton’s sensuous delight in Ovidian fantasy – apparently at odds with his reverence for Christian truth – could be readily subsumed within this underlying tension felt to be at work throughout Milton’s poetry and so dismissed and given little further thought. Yet, this narrowly dualistic perspective is unduly restrictive. Part – and by no means a negligible part – of Milton’s sensibility responded to Ovid with a special intensity.

This said, “Milton continues to enjoy the status of the most monumentally unified author in the canon,” as Nyquist and Ferguson have observed (xii). Shullenberger argues that the image of Milton to emerge in early feminist readings was a caricature, “both powerful and monstrous” (“Wrestling with the Angel,” 81). The resistance of Brydges to the idea that such a “whimsical and undignified kind” of poet as Ovid should have been a “great favourite” (18) with Milton is typical in this respect: “It seems extraordinary that Milton should have taken Ovid for his model. I agree with Warton, that it would have been more probable that he would have taken Lucretius and Virgil as more congenial to him” (Brydges, “The Life of the Author,” which precedes his edition, 29). Martindale (1986, 40–41). Bush argued along similar lines more than fifty years before (1932, 273–5). See too, Turner (viii–ix).


Milton’s early partiality for Ovid once noted, it has been customary to assume that his apprenticeship to the Latin poet concluded with Elegia septima, the last poem in his small collection of Latin elegies. Elizabeth Sauer has referred to this formal leave-taking as the point at which Milton “publicly divorced himself” from Ovid (219), after which, it was argued, he left the service of his first master to follow the more congenial example of Virgil the epic poet: “Ovid leads at the start, but Virgil wins” (Rand, 1926, 165). E. K. Rand’s summarizing comment is representative of those who have charted this alleged shift in allegiance. Yet this conclusion discounts Milton’s own estimation of the Metamorphoses as an epic poem. Although Milton was to express a preference for “the epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, the book of Job, a brief model” (Church-Government II, Col. 3.237), he still regarded Ovid as one of the three canonical epic poets of the classical world. That Rand’s dismissal of Ovid is a convenient over-simplification of the development of Milton’s literary tastes is confirmed by the strong Ovidian presence in Paradise Lost, and is borne out by evidence of a different nature. We have the testimony of Milton’s youngest daughter Deborah that Ovid’s Metamorphoses retained its hold on Milton’s imagination and remained one of the three favourite works that she and her sisters were most often called upon to read to their blind father during the period of the epic’s composition. She recounted to Dr Ward how Isaiah, Homer, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses were books which they were often called to read to their father; and at my desire she repeated a considerable number of verses from the beginning of both these poets with great readiness. Though couched in strongly contemptuous language, the coda to Elegia septima – Haec Ego Mente, Milton’s farewell to elegy – follows the Ovidian tradition and is itself reminiscent of Ovid’s own leave-taking in the Amores. Both poets abandon light elegy in favour of more exalted forms, according to the well-defined hierarchy of genres. Despite what she feels to be a public repudiation of their “affair” on Milton’s part here, Sauer acknowledges that Ovid’s presence continues to haunt Paradise Lost. Indeed, in Elegia prima the young Milton had confidently proclaimed that, if Ovid had never suffered the miseries of exile, he would have been a greater epic poet than either Homer or Virgil (21–4). The debate over whether the Metamorphoses is a “proper” epic continues (see Hinds, 120). Editors from Patrick Hume, who produced the first full commentary on Paradise Lost, through Bishop Thomas Newton and the Reverend Henry J. Todd, editors of the first and second Variorum editions respectively, down to the fine editions from the last century, including those by Douglas Bush, Alastair Fowler, and Roy Flannagan, have confirmed the presence of frequent points of intersection between Paradise Lost and the Metamorphoses which Milton would have expected his “fit audience” to recognize. For a helpful list of such verbal correspondences, see Brill. As quoted in Johnson (1905, Appendix O, I.199). Johnson himself gives a slightly different account: “The books in which his daughter, who used to read to him, represented him as most delighting, after Homer, which he could almost repeat, were Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Euripides” (“Life of Milton,” I.154). However, Ovid remains a constant in both versions.

Introduction

Milton’s nephew, John Phillips, makes a significant contribution to the picture by explicitly linking this recreational reading to his uncle’s habitual working methods: Phillips records that the time “spent in reading” such “choice Poets” was not only “by way of refreshment after the days toyl” but also “to store his Fancy against Morning” (33, emphasis added). II How many bards gild the lapses of time! A few of them have ever been the food Of my delighted fancy. (John Keats, 1816, 1–3)

Milton would have expected the ideal readers of his “fit audience” (VII.31) to have shared his grammar-school education; within that narrow but intensively studied grammar-school curriculum, Ovid occupied a uniquely important position, forming an essential part of the reading and writing programme.10 Following the teaching methods advanced by Quintilian, who exercised such a formative influence on Renaissance reading habits and educational practices, to read well was to read slowly and deeply. It was assumed to be a continuing process involving close reading and re-reading, thereby committing to memory what was read. Quintilian drew attention to this assimilative process when he describes the act of reading as a kind of rumination that should lead naturally to absorption of the text being read. Just as a body digests its food, so is the mind nourished by what it reads: Repetamus autem et tractemus et, ut cibos mansos ac prope liquefactos demittimus, quo facilius digerantur, ita lectio non cruda, sed multa iteratione mollita et velut confecta memoriae imitationique tradatur. (Institutiones Oratoriae, X.i.19) Let us read again [what we have already read] and consider it with care: just as we swallow our food well chewed and almost liquefied, so that it may be the more easily digested, in the same way let us commit to the memory for imitation, not raw reading but reading softened and as it were made ready for use by much re-reading.

Whether in classical or Renaissance theories of literary influence, imitation was never an end in itself: Imitatio per se ipsa non sufficit (“Imitation by itself is just not enough,” Inst. Or. X.ii.4), as Quintilian’s famous caveat made clear. It was readily accepted that too faithful and slavish an adherence to a literary model could at best ensure only partial success: the copy will be to the original, ut umbra corpore (“as the shadow to substance,” Inst. Or. X.ii.11). To avoid being a mere attendant shadow, the ambitious poet must be fired by aemulatio and “enter into 10

For more detailed accounts, see Harding (1946, 1962) and Clarke.


a conscious rivalry with some great writer of the past” (Harding, 1962, 18). As a direct descendant of the line of Renaissance scholar-poets, Milton was heir both to the Roman reverence for the authority of the poetic genres that they themselves had inherited from the Greeks, and to the competitive spirit that had fired them to rival in their own language the achievements of their Greek predecessors. In keeping with the well-defined hierarchy of genres, epic was generally held to be the highest kind of poetry and, in Alexander Pope’s words, “the greatest work human nature is capable of.”11 For poets working within this living tradition it was only possible to create a work worthy of immortality, that “aftertimes ... should not willingly let it die,” by incorporating and extending the achievements of others. As Milton revealed in the famous passage from the Reason of Church-Government, his life’s ambition came to centre on producing for his nation, “what the greatest and choycest wits of Athens, Rome or modern Italy, and the Hebrews of old” had done for theirs (Col. 3.i.237).12 Milton would not, of course, content himself with merely treading in the footsteps of his predecessors in the epic tradition. He was intent upon making his contribution to the genre conform to both his own individual experience and the assimilated experience of the age and nation in which he lived.13 In an illuminating study, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, Thomas Greene usefully analysed the Renaissance practice of imitation into four principal kinds, ranging from the reverently reflective handling of a classical pre-text to the openly antagonistic rejection of it. Given that, “As a Christian poet,” Milton was intent upon pointing out, “the dependent epistemological status of pagan literature, always subordinate for [him] to the truth of sacred scripture or divine revelation” (32), Richard DuRocher has proposed “the more combative, confrontational condition of dialectical imitation” to be the most characteristic mode of allusion to Ovid operating in Paradise Lost (37). However, the tension evident in DuRocher’s emphasis on the “spirit of admiring antagonism” (35) that he feels informs the Milton-Ovid relationship is not so very far removed from the traditional view best exemplified by Douglas Bush. Seeing what he felt to be a “clear divorce between the artist and the theologian” in Milton’s inclusion of mythological material in his Christian epic, Bush drew attention to “the obvious delight with which ... [Milton] lavishes beauty of diction and rhythm upon mythological allusions” whilst “a series of astringent footnotes” relegate “myth 11 “A Receipt to Make an Epic Poem,” from The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), which first appeared in The Guardian, no. 78, 10 June 1713. 12 Although Milton had resolved to compose this work in English, at this point he was still undecided about which poetic form it would take. “Epick” and “stately Tragedy,” as the highest ranking in the hierarchy of the genres, were clearly front-runners, but “Odes and Hymns” were still in contention (Col. 3.i.237–8). 13 Bloom has famously celebrated Milton’s “allusive triumph over tradition” (142), so that Milton’s Christian epic assumes ontological, temporal and imaginative priority over its predecessors and becomes the original epic corpus.

Introduction

to the level of pagan fiction not without gratuitous coldness of manner at best and sometimes with Hebraic warmth” (1932, 273–5). More recently, Sarah Annes Brown has also voiced this customary defence of the epic’s “contamination” of sacred truth by the presence of mythological material when she refers to Milton’s habit of “invoking the beauty of pagan writings only to put them firmly in their place” (101). However valid such comments are as generalizations, they do not attend to certain specific patterns of use within the epic itself: my work will show how those allusions that cluster around Eve do not attract the same dismissive or even qualifying comments that would be expected if Ovid were always an antagonistic presence in the poem.14 III By Types and Shadows: Milton and Mythography Milton’s constant play upon myths from the Metamorphoses naturally forms a central focus of this book.15 Ovid’s poem was the principal instrument in the successful transmission of classical mythology to the Renaissance; his epic was by far the richest treasury of mythological stories that had been passed down from the Graeco-Roman world. Ovid was an inventive storyteller who gave many of these tales their definitive form for later generations. In particular, the first book of the Metamorphoses with its memorable accounts of the creation of the world and of mankind, the loss of the Golden Age and the universal flood, offered a rich and acceptable vein of mythological material for a Christian poet in search of mythological parallels to biblical events. Indeed, the correspondences between the opening book of the Metamorphoses and the book of Genesis were felt to be so remarkable that Arthur Golding, author of the first popular translation of the Metamorphoses, had demanded: “What man is he but would suppose the author of this book / The first foundation of his work from Moses’ writings took?” (“Epistle of 1567,” 342–3). In the Renaissance, the similarities between pagan myth and scriptural truth were held to reveal the mimetic nature of the relationship, reversing the normal direction of dependency between the classical and Christian world. In his History of the World, Walter Ralegh had likened Greek and Roman myths to “crooked images” that distortedly reflect the “one true history” in the scriptures (91). Godfrey Goodman too had claimed many classical myths “had some reference to the truth of historie in Scripture; for,” he reasoned, in terms reminiscent of Quintilian’s 14

Revard has wisely cautioned against “taking a monolithic view of Milton’s mythmaking, assuming that Milton will always use myths or mythic figures in the same way” (2003, 29). 15 Mulryan has pointed out how Milton’s “particular historical moment – the prerationalistic seventeenth century – was enthusiastically open to and profoundly supportive of such creative mythologizing” (5).


influential essay on poetic imitation, “as truth is most ancient, so falsehood would seem to bee the shadow of truth and to accompanie her” (389–99). Ralegh had likewise found in them “Reliques of Truth,” particularly from “the Storie of the First age, with all the workes and marvailes therof, amply and liuely exprest” (84). That the Ancients were generally accredited as having taken “the ground of all their chiefest fables out / Of Scripture” (“Epistle of 1567,” 529–30) would clearly have given additional propriety to Milton’s re-workings of Ovidian myth. Indeed in An essay upon Milton’s imitations of the ancients, William Lauder had defended the principle of Milton’s adaptation of mythological episodes16 by arguing that: “Milton might justly have imagined that any circumstance of his Poem, if it was not repugnant to Holy Writ, although it was pretty closely borrowed from some Part of the Heathen Mythology ... the latter would be look’d on as the Copy” (16). The belief that classical mythology offered “shadowy types of truth” led to a quasi-typological understanding of pagan myth. In the popular mythological handbook, Mystagogus Poeticus, or The Muse’s Interpreter (1647), one of the last important examples of its kind – and one of the few to be written in English – Alexander Ross had applied to classical myth an interpretative technique that closely resembled the typological method of scriptural interpretation. Strictly speaking, the theory of typology propounded that certain figures and episodes in the Old Testament were pre-figurations of Christ and events in the New Testament. Although lacking the scriptural foundation of true typology, it became common to attribute something of the typological function enjoyed by the Old Testament to other pre-Christian materials.17 The close association between the mimetic theory of classical myth and biblical typology is reflected in the language used to describe both. Just as classical myth was referred to as veiling the light of truth or as the shadow that accompanied it, in the Epistle Dedicatorie to MOSES UNVAILED (1620), William Guild had noted how, “darke shaddowes were the fore-runners of that bright substance ... that glorious Anti-type the Messiah”.18 In each case there is a correspondingly proportional relationship: as the type is to the fully revealed truth or anti-type, so is the shadow to the light or the body that casts the shadow.

16 Milton’s inventive application of the story of Narcissus to bring Eve to life is analyzed in detail in the first chapter. 17 Since it occurs in an overtly anti-pagan context, Milton’s inclusion of the image of the infant Hercules strangling serpents in his cradle as a “type” of Christ in the Nativity Ode (227–8) is particularly notable. Significantly such a linkage is not confined to his early work. In Paradise Regained, where for the most part classical allusions are conspicuously absent, Christ’s conquest over Satan is figured through a reference to the triumphant encounter of Hercules, “Joves Alcides,” with “Earths Son Antæus” (IV.565, 563). See Chapters 6 and 7 for examples of more complex typological patterning of this kind. 18 As quoted by Madsen (76–7). The important rhetorical role played by typological figurae, and figurative language in general, continued to be acknowledged in Protestant homilectic theory and practice.

Introduction

Despite his scornful antipathy to super-subtle exegetical speculations,19 Milton was fully alert to the poetical possibilities of typological patterning.20 The persistence of the view that classical myths were shadows of scriptural truth enabled Milton to assign a typological function cognate to that played by the Old Testament to other pre-Christian materials. Eve becomes a kind of antitype who once and for all reveals and fulfils the meaning latent in those pagan myths of a lost Golden Age which were conceived to be corrupted accounts of Eden and the Fall. The theory that Ovid had “with fables shadowed so / The certain truth,” in turn encouraged the practice of reading beneath the surface of the narrative since it was, Golding urged, the reader’s responsibility “to bring again the darkened truth to light” (“Epistle of 1567,” 537–9). Such a view was not new, of course; it even had Patristic authority to endorse it: “The Poets, saith Lactantius, did write the truth, though they writ it disguisedly” (Sandys, 60). Moral and allegorical readings of the Metamorphoses had for centuries allowed Ovid’s work to retain currency in a Christian age, and this interpretative tradition continued to exercise a pervasive influence on poetic re-workings and adaptations of classical myth.21 Although Milton’s use of Ovidian stories in Paradise Lost cannot be fully understood by recourse to typology, moral exempla and allegory alone, the interpretative tradition does, nonetheless, provide essential clues that help the modern reader speculate more precisely about what Milton may have had in mind when, in his own re-working of the mythographic tradition, he invites us to see Eve in a series of Ovidian guises, ranging from the self-absorbed Narcissus to Pyrrha the perfect wife. To make present this tradition, I have drawn heavily upon George Sandys’ comprehensive guide, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d 19 Although he contemptuously dismissed Irenaeus’ elaboration of the typological connections between Mary and Eve (Of Prelaticall Episcopacy, Col. 3.94), Milton exploits the imaginative possibilities of Mary’s role as “Second Eve” on more than one occasion, see Chapters 4 and 7. 20 See Chapter 7 for a detailed discussion of Milton’s imaginative use of the Ovidian characters, Deucalion and Pyrrha, as key figures in the typological patterning of the final books of the poem. 21 This approach is most fully exemplified by the vast compendium of such readings in the Ovide Moralisé. This anonymous work from the fourteenth century subjected the Metamorphoses to a four-fold analysis, interpreting its different layers of meaning – physical or literal, historical, moral and spiritual – along the lines of biblical exegesis. According to this approach, for example, Deucalion is a historical figure who survived a flood that occurred after the biblical deluge. Since he was saved by his exemplary virtue, he is also a type of Noah. Deucalion could also be seen as a type of Christ who would save the world from the flood-waters of sin and convert the stony-hearted. Thus the Metamorphoses itself underwent a change that its author could never have foreseen, as it became fully appropriated into Christian culture. Something of the spirit of the Ovide Moralisé lived on and flourished in the tradition of the Renaissance Ovid. In his early work, Comus, Milton himself had maintained that the stories told by the “sage poets” were “not vain or fabulous” but “taught by the heavenly Muse” (512, 514).


and Represented in Figures. Sandys’ commentary, added as late as 1632, is testimony to the tenacity of the interpretative tradition and affords, as Harding justly remarks, a “convincing illustration of how sharply medieval tradition had etched itself into the consciousness of the men of the late Renaissance” (1946, 24–5). Since this remarkable work offers a unique compendium of the moral and allegorical readings of the Metamorphoses still current in the seventeenth century,22 it provides an invaluable resource for helping to establish the kinds of significance that contemporary readers might have attributed to Milton’s adaptations and extensions of the traditional readings of Ovidian myth with which he enriches his own epic. IV Bringing Ovid into Play: The Responsive but Responsible Reader Milton’s allusions to the Metamorphoses assume a variety of forms ranging from the open imitation of a famous episode or scene, direct quotation or mythological simile to the obliquely suggestive parallel or quasi-identification.23 In demonstrating his own reading of Ovid in Paradise Lost, Milton anticipates a readership sympathetically attuned to the same poetic memories; the presence of such intertexuality is accordingly orientated towards the alert and responsive reader. Such an authorial strategy can never be entirely under the poet’s control, of course. Most obviously, the potentiality of any allusion can only be fully realized if the reader recognizes it, but since, moreover, it is left to the reader to actualize the potential meaning inherent in an allusion by engaging in an act of interpretation that looks beyond the visible page to what lies beneath, the poet must rely upon the reader’s collaboration to complete the literary process. Allusion, Gian Biagio Conte has astutely remarked, “establishes the competence of the Model Reader” (30); the reader’s contribution is especially important when, as William Porter has observed: “Instead of interpreting the classics for us, Paradise Lost does something more interesting, something more challenging as well ... it makes an issue of the reader’s own interpretation of the ancient works” (7). As a consequence, a good deal of responsibility devolves upon the responsive reader who plays an active and vital role in the creation of meaning, “Where more is meant than meets the ear” (Il Penseroso, 120). Charles Martindale is reluctant to entrust such responsibility to the reader. In his eyes, such an interpretative method can be “dangerously open-ended” with 22

Many passages are translated or elaborated from a range of reference works including the Regius-Micyllus commentary, which appeared in standard editions of Ovid’s text, as well as those by Muretus, Stephanus, Hyginus, Plutarch, Diodorus, Augustine, Macrobius, Palaephates, Fulgentius, Vives, Comes and Bacon. 23 Strictly speaking, allusion refers to any implied, indirect or hidden reference, but over time it has come to include direct or overt references too.

Introduction

“insufficient checks” to subjective interpretation and the ingenuity of the reader (1986, 17). While it is important to take heed of Martindale’s cautionary remarks, it has long been recognized that, “whoever will Possess [Milton’s] Ideas must Dig for them, and Oftentimes, pretty far below the Surface.”24 Commenting upon the way Milton gives full play to the reader’s own creative imagination, Thomas Babington Macaulay observed in a passage of fine criticism: The most striking characteristic of the poetry of Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect is produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by what it suggests; not so much by the ideas which it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are connected with them. He electrifies the mind through conductors. The most unimaginative man must understand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice, and requires from him no exertion, but takes the whole upon himself, and sets the images in so clear a light that it is impossible to be blind to them. The works of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed, unless the mind of the reader co-operate with that of the writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play for a mere passive listener. (11)

More recently, critics have observed the way in which the explicitly noted point of contact in Milton’s allusions serves as a nexus for a wider complex of correspondences between texts, drawing the reader into a consideration of similarities other than the immediate point of comparison, even invoking what seems deliberately excluded. Indeed, Christopher Ricks has claimed that Milton is “at his very best only when something prevents him from writing with total directness” (147–8). Milton’s mythological similes depend for their full effect as much on what is covertly suggested as on what is expressly said. The comparison of Eden with Enna is most commonly cited as an instance of the “subterranean virtue” of Milton’s allusions where the poetic energy lurks behind what is ostensibly said, increasing a reader’s sense of gathering and converging significance. As C. S. Lewis so famously observed: ... the deeper value of the simile lies in the resemblance which is not explicitly noted as a resemblance at all, the fact that in both these places the young and beautiful while gathering flowers was ravished by a dark power from the underworld. (43)25

However, to a resisting reader like Richard Bentley, mentally at odds with such an allusive technique, the celebrated comparison of Eden with other delightful gardens

24 Jonathan Richardson, Father and Son, Explanatory Notes on “Paradise Lost” (1734, cxliv; quoted in Ricks, 69). 25 For further discussion of the way Eve becomes implicated in the fate of Proserpina, see Chapters 3 and 6.

10


can only be explained as the work of some meddling editor, and is uncomfortably dismissed as such in his note on the passage. It is, he grumbles ... sillily conducted in its several parts. Not Enna, says he, not Daphne, nor Fons Castalus, nor Nysa, not Mount Amara, could compare with Paradise. Why, sir, who would have suspected that they could though you had never told us of it.

“In poetry all buts are partly ands,” as Frank Kermode astutely noted, “and an elaborate demonstration of the total difference between x and y is undertaken only if they are in some occult manner very alike” (89). While Bush maintained that if such “intensifying or complicating effects are missed ... the main drift is clear,” I would argue that the loss of such moments of heightened awareness in which the lines vibrate with possibilities, though perhaps, “not fatal,” is very real indeed (1961, 632) With such an allusive technique, comparison – though only the first step in attempting to grasp the full implications of an allusion – becomes the pivot of criticism. My method is deliberately flexible and eclectic: sometimes dwelling on minute details or more sustained verbal correspondences, at other times being concerned with less tangible intertextual relationships. The close textual analysis engaged upon in this study presupposes that Milton’s intertextual practice is not random and arbitrary, but is the expression of a deeper poetic impulse: to give imaginative life to his creation, Eve. One obvious and compelling reason for writing a work of this kind is that fewer and fewer readers are as well equipped to appreciate Milton’s subtle and varied use of the Metamorphoses as his own “fit audience,” but, by an effort of historical reconstruction, we too can experience the contemporary reader’s shiver of pleasure at that moment of recognition when we glimpse Milton’s Ovidian Eve. V Transforming Epic: Ovid and Paradise Lost Writing in a spirit of self-conscious rivalry or aemulatio with his own literary predecessors in the epic genre, Ovid had pushed epic beyond its previous boundaries, while openly challenging comparison with Homeric and Virgilian epic in particular. One of the most obvious ways in which Ovid sought to outdo his great predecessors in the epic tradition was to expand the chronological framework. The temporal scale of the Metamorphoses is vast: it embraces an expanse of time that ranges from the very beginnings of the world up to Ovid’s own time, the reign of Augustus. Of course, Milton would, in turn, challenge comparison even with this ambitious time scale: his epic ranges from before the creation of the world and looks forward to a time beyond the world’s end. Neither poem is narrowly nationalistic: both Ovid and Milton departed from epic tradition by taking not just national origins but human origins as their subject.

Introduction

11

In expanding and making more prominent the role of the narrator, Ovid had rejected Aristotle’s recommendations in the Poetics, where he had singled out Homer’s self-effacing narrator for especial praise (83). Ovid not only makes the presence of his poetic persona constantly felt as the means by which the action is mediated to his reader, but at the same time his interweaving of multiple stories and innovative experimentation with frame narratives allows for a new polyphonic epic that admits a multiplicity of perspectives. Unlike the unitary viewpoint of Homeric epic, the Metamorphoses not only incorporates multiple viewpoints but admits contradictory perspectives as a fundamental part of its multilayered texture. In Paradise Lost the overlapping but distinct perspectives offered by Eve as well as Adam on their experience of the events surrounding her creation prove essential for our understanding of the fundamental differences between them at the basis of their relationship. Ovid’s preoccupation with love and desire could, of course, be said to follow the existing lead given by Homer in the Odyssey and by Virgil in the powerful account of Dido’s tragic love for Aeneas. Indeed, when defending the notorious Ars Amatoria to Augustus, Ovid himself had provokingly pointed out to him that no part of the Aeneid was read more than this illicit love affair (nec legitur pars ulla magis de corpore toto, / quam non legitimo foedere iunctus amor, Tristia II.535–6). Nevertheless, the greater prominence given to heterosexual love as a motive force in Ovid’s epic has a knock-on effect, as the natural corollary of this change of focus is a greater emphasis on female characters in what had been predominantly a male world of heroic exploits. While Ovid’s interest in female subjectivity may seem to rest uneasily with the epic mode, it offers us a more sustained access to an interiority only glimpsed in earlier epic poems. Ovid, with his habitual disrespect for boundaries of any kind, flouts the masculine gendering of the epic genre so that femininity as well as masculinity is positively valued.26 Milton takes this one stage further in the narrative focus upon Eve and, to a lesser extent, Sin, by foregrounding family relationships and the domestic sphere as the vital stage of human activity and the centre of epic action. As Ovid’s unique brand of epic has once again begun to find an appreciative audience, the nature and extent of Milton’s accommodation of distinctively Ovidian modes of narration and construction in Paradise Lost has begun to receive critical attention. The valuable contributions of Louis Martz, Poet of Exile (1980), DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (1985) and Martindale, Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (1986), reflected the recent revaluation of the Metamorphoses and the recovery of its relationship to the epic tradition. Martz prepared the way for a more sustained study of Ovid’s contribution to Paradise Lost by noting that while “Ovid’s voice is only one of many voices that we hear within Milton’s ‘various style,’” he believed “it deserves to be recognized as equal in importance to any other voice from Greek or Roman poetry” (216). 26 The challenges offered by Ovid and Milton to the parameters of the epic genre are further discussed in Chapter 2.


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Martindale made more substantial claims by suggesting that, whereas “the influence of Virgil is often exaggerated” (107), the presence of Ovid in Paradise Lost has not always been given full recognition. “Ovid,” Martindale maintains, “contributed something vital to the structure of Milton’s imagination” (181). Martindale’s sensitive response to the Ovidian atmosphere in Paradise Lost is especially suggestive for the particular concerns of this study: although he discovered “Ovidian feeling ... diffused throughout large parts of Paradise Lost,” he found it to be “particularly evident whenever Eve is on the scene” (191). In his suggestive chapter, “From Proserpina to Pyrrha: Ovidian Faces of Eve in Paradise Lost,” DuRocher’s approach is more analytical than impressionistic: he demonstrates how Milton aligns Eve with famous mythological figures from the Metamorphoses in a carefully managed sequence to highlight “distinct stages of Eve’s development” (75). Martz and, more recently, Sarah Annes Brown have also remarked upon the shaping influence of Ovid upon Milton’s portrayal of Eve, but since in each case their observations form part of a larger survey, much more remains to be said about Milton’s Ovidian Eve.27 VI Milton and the First Woman Over the last twenty-five years or so, one of the most lively debates in criticism has centred upon Milton’s attitude to women. An imposing pile of articles has accumulated as testimony to the preoccupation of critics with the sexual politics of the first marriage.28 The relationship of the first man and woman has largely formed the disputed territory on which to attack or defend Milton against the charge of misogyny, or, at least, of what is held to be an offensively patriarchal rendering of gender difference. Objections to Milton’s attitude to women and the claim that he revealed in his writings, “something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate beings,” go back at least to Johnson’s authoritative pronouncement (I.157). There is no denying the “stridently masculinist” tone that Nyquist discovers in the lines that notoriously proclaim the placing of the first man and woman in a hierarchical relationship of greater and lesser, superior and inferior (107). The oft-quoted “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (IV.299) 27

For valuable background material on the figure of Eve as she emerges in the early Jewish and Christian traditions, see Norris, “The Making of a Bad Reputation,” the first part of Eve: A Biography. 28 Principal contributions to this continuing debate include those by: Norford; Landy; Mollenkott (1973); Lewalski (1974); Swaim (1976); Gilbert (1978); Aers and Hodge; Webber; Farwell; Froula; Peczenik; Belsey; Nyquist; Halley; Wilding; Schoenfeldt; Wittreich (1987); Polydorou. See the recent work by Almond for useful background to Adam and Eve in seventeenth-century thought, and for a more detailed discussion of the dynamics of the first marriage, see Chapters 6 and 7.

Introduction

13

or the statement that Adam and Eve were “Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd” (IV.296), together with the references to Adam’s “Absolute rule” (IV.301) and “superior Love” (IV.499) are textual facts and obdurately remain as unequivocal expressions of the inequality of the sexes. Nevertheless, by aligning Milton’s revision of paradisal marriage with the emergence of the “companionate marriage”29 promoted by the Reformers,30 a number of contributions to the debate have tended to shift the ground a little by drawing attention away from male dominance and female subjection to the stress laid upon mutuality, reciprocity and interdependence in the relationship of the first man and woman.31 Nyquist, however, remains concerned that the prominence thereby given to Adam and Eve’s mutual dependence in recent critical discussions merely masks Milton’s “deeply masculinist assumptions,” in which Eve is still clearly a derivative creature of “secondary status” to Adam (106). “Differences that in Paradise Lost are ordered hierarchically and ideologically,” she claims, thus “tend to be neutralized by a critical discourse interested in formal balance and harmonious pairing” (99–100). While Nyquist’s objection is true, it is clearly not the whole truth. During the course of this study I will demonstrate how Milton’s manipulation of Ovidian motifs enables his handling of the relationship between the sexes before the Fall to be more complex and fluid than the rigidly hierarchical conception of gender designation offered by our first introduction to the human couple. Indeed the terms of the first marriage refuse to be so neatly fixed and formulated. As well as emphasizing male authority and female submission, Milton also refers to the couple in terms that seem to indicate their absolute equality, sometimes stressing their separateness as distinct individuals, at other times suggesting that they are complementary halves of a single composite whole, but also, more surprisingly perhaps, he repeatedly encourages the reader to seriously entertain the possibility of Eve’s superiority to Adam, and her authority over him. The reader’s dilemma cannot be resolved by merely rejecting one view in favour of another; we are neither invited nor permitted to choose exclusively between them until after the Fall. While a doctrine of male supremacy may clearly be abstracted from the lines quoted above from Book IV, and supported by Milton’s pronouncements in the divorce tracts, the idea enacted in Paradise Lost evolves with a very different emphasis. One of the particular concerns of this study is to examine the way the actual distribution of power in the relationship complicates and qualifies, if not challenges and subverts, any single authorized version of male superiority and female inferiority.

See Stone’s classic study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. Useful discussions of this phenomenon include those by: Haller and Haller; William Haller; Halkett; Di Salvo; Turner. 31 Important examples of this stance include: Lewalski (1974); Webber; McColley (1999). 29 30

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Gender difference is more a matter of degree than kind before the Fall, and both Adam and Eve must learn by experience the nature and limitations of the different kinds of authority assigned to them. Whereas Adam’s position of authority is openly declared and made manifest, Eve’s is conferred upon her more covertly. Her power issues from her abundantly fertile role in the garden, where she becomes the “sourse of life” (XI.169), and from her embodiment of grace and beauty. Eve’s “softening” of Adam through her “graceful acts” (VIII.600) is the foundation of human society and civilization, and will be responsible for the process of spiritual regeneration after the Fall. Nevertheless, it is the fact of her superior beauty as the “Fairest resemblance” of their “Maker faire” (IX.538) that arguably has most sway over Adam and is particularly double-edged: on the one hand, her “Celestial Beautie” (IX.540) is a delight to be enjoyed and a force for good, while on the other, it inclines Adam to see in Eve a perfected version of himself that is closer to their creator. Moreover, her inherent sense of self-sufficiency and independence over-awe Adam who defers to Eve’s “Virgin Majestie” (IX.270) in the gardening debate. In this way, Eve begins to enjoy a position “more” rather than “less” equal to Adam in the economy of Paradise, a tendency further accentuated by the circumstances attending their respective nativities. Put in its most simple form, Adam was created feeling that something was missing from Paradise; that void was filled by Eve, his “hearts desire” (VIII.451). However, claimed by Adam as “My other half” (IV.488), Eve has her reservations, and when worked upon by Satan, she recognizes her lack of choice and yearns for something more than Paradise can supply and a larger sphere of influence. Before the Fall, then, both Adam and Eve are susceptible to overvaluing the sources of her authority over him and undervaluing his over her.32 In recent years a number of critics have uncovered moments when the narrative seems to run against the grain of its “official” convictions. The sense that the poem is straining against the weight of patriarchal assumptions is further intensified by the narrative design with its richly Ovidian texture and jostling perspectives in which Eve as well as Adam is granted a valid viewpoint. Whereas Catherine Belsey’s study finds a “play of contending voices and positions, never quite containable by its ‘monological’ control,”33 Stevie Davies celebrates such contradictory perspectives as a vital part of the epic’s multi-layered texture. Paradise Lost is, she concludes, “a polyphonic masterpiece whose many voices cannot in the nature of things concur” (1991, 100). James Grantham Turner too sees Milton as a “heroic synthesizer of incompatible materials” (ix) and stresses the way he thereby continually pushes at the “ ‘limits of the thinkable’” (vii), speaking at times, “as the representative of a humanity broader than his ‘Puritan’ culture or his ‘masculine’ gender” (307). 32 Chapters 4, 5 and 7 offer a range of perspectives on this issue, and the kinds of authority that Eve enjoys before the Fall. 33 From Terry Eagleton’s preface to Belsey (viii–ix).

Introduction

15

While we cannot expect even such an independent and original thinker as John Milton to transcend his historical context entirely, we do not expect him to be merely a passive reflector of it either. By situating Milton’s presentation of gender relations historically, within a wide range of primary sources, including conduct books and theological treatises,34 Milton’s own divorce tracts together with Joshua Sylvester’s enormously popular translation of the French Protestant, Guillaume de Sallust Du Bartas’ biblical epic, His Divine Weeks and Works (probably the best known literary treatment of the Creation and Fall before Milton’s own poem), it can be demonstrated that, when viewed in the context of seventeenth-century cultural assumptions, Eve’s part in the narrative is remarkably rich and varied, and she is seen to enjoy an exceptional degree of prominence and independent power.35 In Sylvester’s Du Bartas, for example, Eve is excluded from the picture of life in Eden in order to focus upon Adam and his pursuits (II.i.1.70–501). While Milton carefully motivates those occasions when Eve leaves the stage, Sylvester’s Eve simply disappears from view after her creation only to reappear ready to be the convenient target for Satan’s temptation. As Dudley R. Hutcherson has observed, “The first real interest in Eve in many versions of the tradition is the beginning of the temptation” (1960, 21). Unlike other Eves, then, Milton’s Eve has been liberated from a narrowly reductive function in the poem’s narrative and theological scheme. She is a fully imagined presence in the Garden, whose contribution to Paradise is now recognized.36 Although Eve manages the domestic front single-handedly, she is no “domestic drudge,” as Sandra Gilbert would have had us view her (Gilbert and Gubar, 203ff); her sphere of agency is not confined to the bower alone.37 Like Adam, she is seen to share the image of God the “sovran Planter” (IV.691) and takes a full and active part in all aspects of life in the Garden.38 However, the dialectical and polemical character that the critical debate has continued to assume has inevitably led to incompatible readings of Milton and his attitude to Eve. Pressed to its most extreme formulation, critics “find” in the text Milton the “misogynist” and “male suprematicist” on the one hand, and Milton 34 These will include: Ralegh’s The History of the World (1614); Goodman’s popular Fall of Man (1616); Augustine’s De Civitate Dei; Calvin’s Institutio Christianae Religionis (1576); Spenser’s Faerie Queen, all of which “Milton knew well and used freely” (Robert Adams, 164). The conduct books referred to are: Perkins’ Christian Oeconomie (1609); Whatley’s The Bride Bush (1619); Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties (1622); Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour (1642). 35 Indeed, Webber, one of Milton’s most stalwart defenders, viewed Milton as a “revolutionary thinker and poet” who depicted Eve in “challenging and revolutionary ways” (6). 36 See Lewalski (1974) 3, where she takes issue with Landy’s complaints about the limitations of the female role in Paradise Lost. See too McColley (1983, 110–39). 37 Milton’s Eve may fit the outline of the Puritan housewife, but as Froula observes, the outline does not contain her (1984, 172). 38 The significance of Eve’s role in the garden is fully discussed in Chapters 3 and 5.


16

the proto-feminist, “the first great feminist in Western culture” and “patron-saint of the companionate marriage” on the other.39 While these selective revisions are often richly documented and persuasively argued, they offer us only a partial perspective. Negotiating our way through such disparate views of Milton, it becomes clear that different readings of the author serve to condition our response and either privilege or preclude particular readings of the poem, encouraging an “either ... or” mentality rather than a “both ... and” cast of mind. It seems at least worth pursuing the possibility that such alternatives need not necessarily be mutually exclusive and attempt to accommodate different aspects in a syncretistic reading of Milton the author of Paradise Lost. The assumption of complexity that underlies my version of Milton the author thus both grows out of and at the same time helps to determine my reading of Milton’s Ovidian Eve who proves at least as intriguingly multifaceted as her author. VII The Many Faces of Eve Every wife should be to her husband, as Evah was to Adam, a whole World of women; and every husband should be to his wife, as Adam was to Evah, a whole World of men. (William Secker, A Wedding-Ring Fit for the Finger, 31–2)

Over the centuries, so dynamic and protean a character as Satan understandably diverted critical attention away from the human couple, and yet, in recent years, readers have increasingly responded to the imaginative energy that animates Milton’s Eve.40 Her pivotal role in the poem as “the primary protagonist of the Fall, but also the primary human agent in redemption” has even led to her nomination as the new hero of the poem: “Milton’s epic,” Barbara K. Lewalski concludes, “turns into an Eviad,” casting Eve rather than Adam as “the first human to reach the new standard of epic heroism” (2000, 486–7). When fashioning Satan and Eve, Milton adopted a similar technique; one of the reasons why the Fallen Angel looms so large in our imaginative recollection of the poem must surely lie in the way Milton appropriates narrative paradigms from classical epic to structure Satan’s characterization, and in the rich layer of imagery – including a number of fine and hauntingly evocative similes – with 39 Gilbert confidently asserts Milton’s “undeniable misogyny” (1979, 21); Wilding explores the view of Milton as “male suprematicist” (183); for Milton as a “proto-feminist” see Wittreich (1987) and Gallagher. Woods judiciously places herself between these positions: “Though not a misogynist, Milton is locked into his culture’s assumptions of woman’s inferior position in the human paradigm” (16). 40 Wittreich has wryly noted that Milton “may be of the Devil’s party without knowing it, but he is also of Eve’s party and knows it full well” (98).

Introduction

17

which he surrounds him. In a comparable way, Eve too attracts many mythological allusions and similes, both minute figurations of detail and larger figurations of structure and form. Indeed, when painting his portrait of Eve, Milton employs a technique peculiar to her in the poem: her character is not only presented directly, but obliquely, through the medium of a controlled and inspired evocation of figures from Ovidian myth. By presenting her through this strategy of deliberate allusion, Milton extends and enriches his portrayal of Eve, endowing her with a mythic dimension that Adam almost entirely lacks. Milton generally avoids these intensifying and complicating effects in his portrait of Adam who consequently seems, at times, one-dimensional in comparison. Indeed, while readers have – like Adam, Satan, even the narrator himself – frequently felt the fascination of Eve, Adam has often been dismissed as “a singularly unsatisfying character” (Bouchard, 55), “with little personality” in comparison (Norford, 1978, 11). Like the Father and the Son, it seems that unfallen Adam is weighed down by the burden of theological doctrine so that Milton is unable to treat him with the same imaginative freedom that characterized his handling of both Satan and Eve. For his study of Eve, Milton left the safety of a faithful reproduction or literalminded paraphrase of the scriptural account for the risks attendant on an original treatment, transforming the sketchy, incomplete outline in Genesis into a threedimensional figure. Unlike the objectification of the first woman in Sylvester’s Du Bartas, Milton’s Eve is not simply an animated work of art or an attendant shadow of Adam.41 Just as in the verse letters of the Heroides Ovid had imaginatively reconstructed the neglected feelings and viewpoints of the women of classical myth, Milton succeeds in depicting an authentic female perspective on the events of his narrative. During the Renaissance, Ovid’s diverse narratives of love and desire, particularly those featured in the Metamorphoses, had come to be especially valued as material for the construction of early modern representations of subjectivity and as vehicles for conveying the complexities and ambiguities of sexuality, the psychology of desire and the instability of gender roles.42 In keeping with this aspect of Renaissance Ovidianism, Milton appropriates narrative structures and emblematic locations from the Metamorphoses not only to amplify the elliptical account supplied in Genesis but also to articulate Eve’s developing experience, elucidating complex emotional situations and enabling an insight into her sense of self and her sexuality. Milton displays his assimilative genius to advantage in the way he uses discrete episodes from the Metamorphoses as narrative hinges, combining and coordinating different Ovidian myths into an evolving narrative sequence.43 41 Chapter 1 explores the way in which Milton’s Eve breaks free from the position of Pygmalion’s ivory maid, brought to life for her husband’s pleasure or as an echo of his will. 42 See, for instance, Milowicki and Wilson, and Enterline. 43 Chapters 1–3 attend to the way Milton combines the myths of Narcissus, Daphne and Chloris-Flora into an evolving narrative sequence.


18

By yoking narrative paradigms from these tales into fruitful collaboration, Milton stirs the dry bones of Genesis to strangely independent life and meaning and offers complex emotional and psychological insights into the first woman. Milton follows through the consequences of endowing Eve with a genuine subject position. By placing Eve within an Ovidian frame of reference, we can observe more closely how Milton arrives at answers to a new set of questions: What happened when Eve was separated from Adam immediately after her creation? How should we interpret Eve’s lack of response to Adam’s first words to her? Did Eve fall in love with Adam at first sight? How did the first woman pass her time in Eden? Why had Adam and Eve separated on the morning of the Fall? What was on her mind as she ate the apple? What brought about their reconciliation after the bitter accusations levelled by Adam against her in the Judgement scene? And so forth. As a consequence, a considerable amount of the imaginative power of the poem is found to be located in the interpretative choices that Milton offers his readers in the interstices of the biblical text. At such critical moments, Milton unsettles preconditioned responses and converts this familiar story into a tale of the unexpected. Eve is no Frankenstein’s monster assembled from literary bits and pieces: the cumulative effect of these mythological identifications is rather to intensify than to dissipate our sense of Eve’s integrity and complexity and to supply coherent narrative contexts in which she may act. Eve’s individuality is never thereby engulfed, and her appearances on the epic stage are not a mere succession of transitory and truncated episodes. We are not confronted with an arbitrary or indiscriminate use of mythological symbolism but genuine ambiguities in Milton’s representation of Eve. Paradoxically, Eve is never more powerfully herself than in those crucial, defining moments when Milton glimpses her in quintessentially Ovidian mythological guise. Of course, Ovid did not enjoy a monopoly on mythmaking, but more often than not it is the Ovidian version of a tale that prevailed, as in the cases of Narcissus, Daphne and Apollo, Pygmalion and Deucalion and Pyrrha, while some myths, for instance, the transformation of Chloris into Flora or the match between Pomona and Vertumnus, are unique to Ovid. By subsuming these “shadowy types” as partial expressions of her own comprehensive nature, Eve becomes for Adam “a whole world of women;” while Adam conspicuously fails to be for Eve, “a whole World of men.”44 VIII Aspects of Allusive Significance While Isabel MacCaffrey has remarked upon the obvious usefulness of Milton’s invocation of mythological settings and figures “as a descriptive technique in a situation forbidding description” (121), such allusions neither work at a merely 44

The implications of this point are more fully developed in Chapters 4 and 6.

Introduction

19

decorative level nor are used exclusively for visual effect. Milton’s mythological similes rarely deal in “straight” analogy, and, as Geoffrey Hartman has shown, his finest comparisons are evaluative, yielding magnifying or diminishing effects. Before the Fall this process may seem to be mainly one of “aggrandizement” (Whaler, 1035–6): Milton compares Eve with mythological figures to her advantage in a way that could be simply seen as an extension of the competitive spirit that fuelled his youthful patriotic praise of British beauties in Elegia prima (69–76). However, the result of such points of contact is neither, of course, as straightforward nor as unambivalent as this would seem to imply. The mythological figurations that align Eve with myths from the Metamorphoses do not serve as merely incidental accompanying imagery, nor do they simply serve to enhance the aesthetic dimension – though they do that too – but are the result of a more significant level of association that demands interpretation and brings the reader into play. They introduce an element of metaphorical identification and signal vital information about Eve herself. The imaginative colouring thus becomes the very means whereby Eve is presented, as it were athwart her pagan representatives. Such mythological figurations do not simply encourage us to admire at a distance, but are designed to engage us in issues of immediate human interest – how does Eve feel about herself? Adam? Marriage? Love and sex? Work? Her place in the world? In this way the significance of allusion extends beyond rhetorical manoeuvring and can be deployed as a means of furthering psychological as well as narrative and thematic developments and heightening emotional conflicts. Such allusions are never introduced casually or arbitrarily, nor are they isolated, local effects: they always contribute substantially to our sense of Eve herself, guiding our understanding and providing important insights into what she thinks, says and does, as well as working in concert to become an indispensable spring in the mechanism of the argument and to further our understanding of the convergence of differing impulses that lead to the Fall. From the outset, with Eve’s unforgettable appearance as Narcissus, Milton’s strategic deployment of mythological allusion evokes complex feelings about Eve, qualifying as well as intensifying our responses, releasing ironic as well as enhancing suggestiveness, raising genuine questions about the place assigned to woman in the divine hierarchy. Nevertheless, too often the meaning of an allusion has been determined in advance because of a distorting over-emphasis on its proleptic function. Critics have been eager to alert the reader when a simile, borrowed episode or oblique allusion seems to draw Eve into a web of implication from whose inexorable sequel she cannot escape.45 From this perspective, it is tempting to seize upon one or two mythological correspondences, as between Eve and Narcissus, Proserpina or Circe, and find in them the formative motifs for her 45

See, for example, Empson (172–9); Harding (1962, 67–85); Bush (1961, 631–40); Giamatti (295–355); Demetrakopoulos (96–106). Emphasis is also placed upon Eve’s Circean role by, among others, Steadman (1967, 108–36); Seaman (102–3); and by Brodwin (58–61).


20

character study.46 After unravelling a couple of darkly disturbing skeins from the mass of interconnecting threads in this allusive tangle, it is possible to overlook others that lead in a different direction or, more interestingly, are placed under considerable tension. If we look more carefully, it is possible to see how Milton deliberately fails to fix the meaning of such allusions which thereby become a way of holding in solution unresolved, even contradictory emphases in a situation where alternatives are not yet exclusive and the future has not been fixed. By referring the reader outside of the narrative proper and calling attention to something other than the immediate point of comparison, allusions may result in calculatedly ambiguous effects. Most obviously, they may generate around Eve an “aura of innocence about to be despoiled” (Revard, 1997, 36) or they may insinuate doubts and uncertainties about her innocence, but they may also be used to suggest how things might have been, if Eve had not taken the apple, or to anticipate the redemptive and regenerative process. More interesting still, a number of such allusions cut a number of ways simultaneously and are the means whereby Milton enables the reader to hold in equilibrium more than one point of view. Conversely, some critics have attempted to free Eve altogether from any compromising insinuations before the Fall, appealing to the reader’s tact and discrimination, charging us not to unravel the full content of an allusion and thereby cauterize it of any damaging implications. One of the most eloquent speakers for this position is Diane Kelsey McColley. The exclusive concern of her fine scholarly defence of Milton’s Eve is to promote a “regenerative reading” of Eve’s role before the Fall, and thus supply a necessary corrective to the reductive readings of Eve’s participation in the epic. In this vein, she insists that: “as long as she remains unfallen Eve redeems the beauty, the richness of sensory experience and the erotic delight that the pagan impersonations depict in their fallen and destructive forms” (1983, 67). While this is indeed persuasive to a point, more must be said about Eve’s mythological appearances before the Fall: a number of the iconic figures that magnify the imaginative power of her presence provide the very grounds for impugning her as a character and symbol. Those critics that have commented on Eve’s “double image”47 have invariably seen it as something to be apprehended consecutively,48 contrasting Eve before and after the Fall, most commonly focusing exclusively on her as “temptress”

46

See Sauer (216) as a recent example of this continuing response. Eve retains within herself an inherent complexity, holding a number of opposing aspects together Janus-like; Chapters 5 and 6 investigate a number of significant examples of this duality. 48 Even DuRocher, who raises so many interesting possibilities in his chapter on Eve, summarizes his findings in a way that typifies this response: “The allusions alert the reader to Eve’s vulnerability before the Fall and underscore her part in the redemption afterward” (11). 47

Introduction

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then “redemptrix”49 (Seaman, 113–4). While H. R. Hays has alleged that Milton suffered a “horror of sex and women” (173) and Don Parry Norford maintains that there exists an “intimate affinity of evil with Eve” (1975, 33), Milton’s Eve is not cast in the role of fatally seductive temptress50 common to misogynistic stereotyping. Sauer has, nevertheless, insisted that Milton’s Ovidianism in Paradise Lost serves to reinforce misogynistic attitudes: the “female body,” she claims, “is depicted as ‘double-form’d’ (PL 2.741), monstrous and essentially Ovidian” (208). Here “Ovidian” metamorphosis has become simply synonymous with moral and physical degeneration, whereas it can also be, as we shall see in the case of Eve, an elevating and sublimating process.51 Sauer states further that it is “The more grotesque scenes” of metamorphosis that “are projected onto the female body, which becomes the locus for mutability as well as the register of the patriarchal attitudes to women conveyed by early modern culture” (215–6). Sauer evidently has in mind here the disfiguring metamorphosis that overtakes Sin, but even here, as Anna Juhnke contends, Milton has thereby “projected the wickedEve stereotype away from Eve onto the other females in Paradise Lost” (50). This said, it is surely surprising that the response elicited from the reader at this point is not simply one of disgust: Sin’s harrowing first-person narrative invites the reader’s sympathy, and, as so often in the Metamorphoses, it is the female victim of rape who remains here the emotional focus of the episode. Although certainly associated with Sin by important figurative links, as Gilbert and others have so fully and forcefully demonstrated,52 Eve’s experience is more often sharply defined against Sin’s than identified with it. The parallels between Sin and Eve, while undeniable, need not be evidence of misogynistic attitudes on Milton’s part: they can be seen both to reinforce our sense of Eve’s own subjectivity, and to raise questions about her feelings for Adam and their sexual relationship, where the subtext of rape, even when leading to a more permanent partnership, complicates the expected picture of a blissfully happy union.53 Moreover, a vital and necessary corrective to this partial view is to be found in the poetic alignment of Eve’s role with that of the Son. Eve’s position in the 49 Although McColley’s overriding purpose is to redeem Eve from narrowly proleptic readings of her part in the epic before the Fall, she stops deliberately short of a “redemptive” reading of her postlapsarian role. Chapter 7 is primarily concerned with providing a context for the points of contact between Eve and the Son together with a discussion of the vital role she plays in mankind’s spiritual regeneration after the Fall. 50 For Milton’s innovative use of the myth of Circe, see Chapter 6. 51 See Chapter 3 for discussion of Milton’s application to Eve of the earth nymph Chloris’ transformation into Flora, goddess of flowers. Milton had already indicated the way in which Ovidian metamorphosis could be elevating and empowering in the promotion of Sabrina, “a Virgin pure,” who undergoes “a quick immortal change” to be “Made Goddess of the River” (Comus 826, 841–2). 52 See Note 45 to Chapter 6 for a detailed listing of some of the most obvious parallels. 53 See Chapters 2 and 3 where this is analyzed in greater detail.

22


hierarchies of heaven, earth and hell is inevitably complicated by her complex association not only with Sin, but with the Son himself, and it is this poetic linkage which arguably proves more significant and profound. After the Fall, Eve’s “sweet attractive Grace” (IV.298) draws Adam to repentance and heightens her resemblance to the Son as an instrument of grace rather than looks back to an association with Sin, who also displayed “attractive graces” (II.762). While some attention has been paid to the redemptive role Eve plays in initiating the movement towards repentance, the ramifications of Milton’s poetic identification of the process of inward spiritual regeneration with Deucalion and Pyrrha’s recreation of the human race from stones softening to flesh have yet to be fully explored, and will provide the main focus of the final chapter.54 Milton uses Ovidian figurations to suggest the comprehensive, shifting balance of opposing forces that is fundamental to his conception of Eve from the outset. Like the earth itself, “self-ballanc’t on her Center” (VII.242), there is nothing static about Eve’s innocence. It is an actively attained state, even in one who has never been out of balance, an equilibrium in which all manner of forces and energies strive for full expression. Thus innocence always trembles on the brink of dissolution, for nothing short of perfect balance will serve to maintain it, while the eagerness of innocence to embrace all that may be enjoyed ensures that the means will be found for its destruction.

54 Shullenberger has called for a study of “Eve’s genuine links with the Son of God as true hero rather than her profoundly ironic and contrasting parallels to Satan” (1986, 79).

Chapter 1

“The Fairer Image”: Reflections of Narcissus and Pygmalion’s Ivory Maid Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets turn it into something better, or at least something different. T. S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood

In the central books of Paradise Lost, one of Milton’s most pressing concerns was to imagine and make vividly real to his reader the ways of the first man and woman. When fashioning the first woman, Milton turned primarily to Ovid for guidance, but when it came to shaping the events surrounding Eve’s nativity the Metamorphoses would seem to have little to offer. In Ovid’s account of mankind’s origins in the Metamorphoses, surprisingly, “nothing is spoken of the creation of Woman,” as George Sandys remarked (58). Whereas Hesiod’s accounts of Pandora’s creation in the Theogony (570–612) and Works and Days (57–105) are both openly hostile, Ovid omits any mention of this myth with its strongly misogynistic associations. Yet, in spite of this, Eve’s account of her first moments of existence is generally acknowledged to be one of the most unequivocal examples of a specifically Ovidian episode in the poem. Milton uses the tale of Narcissus’ longing for his reflected image in a pool as a template for this autobiographical episode. Over the past decade, a number of critics have used categories drawn from the influential writings of Lacan to structure their discussion of Eve’s “mirror stage”; my particular purpose in the present chapter is not so much to debate whether or not the imposition of a Lacanian perspective

In contrast, Pyrrha, the first woman to appear in Ovid’s epic, is an exemplary figure, devout and devoted to her husband (Met. I.318–415). (See Chapter 7 for a discussion of Pyrrha’s part in Milton’s epic.) As Anderson has pointed out: “We possess no other extended narration about Narcissus, and, although some people argue that much of Ovid’s achievement should be credited to a lost Hellenistic source, there is no evidence whatsoever for such material” (372). All notes by Anderson are taken from his edition of the Metamorphoses published by the U of Oklahoma Press (1972, 1997). See Lacan (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 1–7). Most notably: Champagne (48–59); Corum (132–3); Earl (13–16); Gregerson (158–60); Grossman (150); Roberta C. Martin (57–79); Zimmerman (247–67). Lewalski helpfully summarizes the way that Eve’s story can be seen as presenting, “a classic Lacanian mirror scene: initial symbiosis with maternal earth and water in a place of pleasure before

24


is illuminating, but to demonstrate that Milton’s representation of Eve’s own creation narrative is indisputably Ovidian. I The account of Eve’s creation in the book of Genesis tends to concision just this side of silence, thereby allowing a poet of Milton’s imaginative power the opportunity to wrap flesh around the bare bones of the scriptural account. Observing that it was “not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. II.18), the Lord God: ... caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the Flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man. (Gen. II.21–3)

The biblical account of the creation of “Woman” is teasingly elliptical, leaving much unsaid. Only certain decisive moments are recorded, thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed and invite interpretation. Nevertheless, the vantage point from which we, as readers, are encouraged to observe what takes place is, evidently and unsurprisingly, a male viewpoint. Moreover, we may be so accustomed to the passage as it stands that we may not even stop to consider certain fundamental questions that the narrative fails to answer: where was Eve removed to immediately after her creation from Adam, and why? What did she do before her Creator led her back to Adam? What was her response to Adam’s proprietorial declaration, “This is now bone of my bone ... ”? If we turn to Joshua Sylvester’s rendering “Of the Creation of Woman,” these interpretative opportunities are likewise passed over in silence. Indeed, the episode provides a useful measure of Milton’s creative re-working of the same authoritative biblical passage. The narrator elaborates on the spare account in Genesis only by enthusing over Eve’s “rare beauties” and Adam’s enthusiastic reception of his new bride. Like the sculptor Pygmalion who carved out of ivory the likeness of a woman, adorned with such flawless beauty that she surpassed in loveliness any woman born (Met. X.247–9), God from Adam: ... took a rib, which rarely He refin’d, And thereof made the Mother of Mankinde: Graving so lively on the living bone All Adam’s beauties; that, but hardly, one language, then a rupture when God’s voice (the Law of the Father) intervenes, leading her to a husband and thereby into language and culture” (2000, 483). This story existed in antiquity before Ovid’s version of the narrative, but as a rather sordid affair of a king of Cyprus who tried to have sexual intercourse with a statue of Venus.

“The Fairer Image”

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Could have the Lover from his Love descry’d, Or known the Bridegroom from his gentle Bride. (Du Bartas, I.vi.1042–7)

Having taken note of their general resemblance, Sylvester takes an almost voyeuristic pleasure in enumerating the particular differences between the first woman and the first man: ... she had a more smiling Eye, A smoother Chin, a Cheek of purer Dye, A fainter Voyce, a more inticing Face, A deeper Tress, a more delighting Grace, And in her Bosom (more then Lillie-white) Two swelling Mounts of Ivory, panting light. (Du Bartas, I.vi.1048–53)

There is little doubt that Adam is exceedingly well pleased with the result: No sooner Adam’s ravisht eyes did glance On the rare beauties of his new-come Half, But in his heart be ’gan to leap and laugh, Kissing her kindly, calling her his Life, His Loue, His stay, his Rest, his Weal, his Wife, His other-Selfe, his Help (him to refresh) Bone of his Bone, Flesh of his very Flesh. (Du Bartas, I.vi.1055–61)

From the unequivocally male perspective of the third-person narrative of Sylvester’s Du Bartas, which we as readers are insistently invited to share, God’s latest creation is a figure entirely, if discreetly, defined by her sexual identity. Indeed as the first woman is appraised under the gaze of this connoisseur of feminine beauty she becomes an aesthetic object, a veritable work of art to be looked at and admired – little more than an ivory statue. The reifying effect of this blazon only accentuates her silence and the lack of attention given to her response. (It is notable too that this Eve is simply effaced from the account of life in Eden before the Fall and only takes a speaking part for her encounter with Satan.) She seems more like this Adam’s “living doll” than his soul mate. There are obvious iconographic parallels between the creation of Eve from Adam’s living bone and Pygmalion’s ivory maid who softens into flesh and comes to life a fully formed woman, awakened like Sleeping Beauty with a lover’s

Sharrock describes this process of objectification in the opening remarks to her article on Ovid’s version of the Pygmalion myth: “Women are ‘perceived’. We speak often not just of ‘women,’ but of ‘images,’ ‘representations,’ ‘reflections’ of women. Woman perceived is woman as art-object; and paradigmatic of this phenomenon is the myth of Pygmalion” (1991, 36). Both are thus modelled from related materials. It is important to appreciate the exceptional nature of Pygmalion’s creation: not only was the statue made from ivory rather than Parian marble, but the whole piece is of ivory. Fantham draws attention to the significance of this point by observing that: “Historically, ivory would be used only as an overlay for the exposed flesh of a life-size statue” (60).


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kiss. The answer to Pygmalion’s prayer, she seems the ideal woman and perfect wife, at once compliantly submissive and alluringly erotic: a fantasy figure with an enduring appeal – the Stepford wives seem cast from the same mould – whose whole world is her husband. Without a name and without a voice, the former statue may seem as much Pygmalion’s possession as the piece of ivory from which she was originally crafted. She has no separate identity apart from Pygmalion to whom – with the aid of Venus – she owes her very existence, while her future role, so far as the narrative in the Metamorphoses appears concerned, is to bear his child. However, the text in the Metamorphoses does not simply enact the transformation of cold, hard ivory to warm, soft flesh; her successful metamorphosis from lifeless statue to living woman is signalled in the text by the crucial word sensit (“she felt,” Met. X.293), which indicates a significant shift in focus from the sensations experienced by Pygmalion to the dawning consciousness of his newly awakened bride. When she finally opens her eyes and timidly looks up: pariter cum caelo vidit amantem (“she saw at once her lover and the sky,” Met. X.294); as Genevieve Liveley observes: “The look that the statue-turned woman offers back to her creator as she comes to life represents the defining point of her vivification” (207). In that moment, she is promoted from lifelike, but lifeless, aesthetic object to human being, observing the world from her own unique perspective. Although Ovid does not pursue this line of thought himself, his narrative opens up the intriguing speculation: how would it feel to be brought into the world fully grown, without any experience of life, and to find oneself at once the object of another’s passion? By imaginatively reconstructing Eve’s first moments of life and her initial response to Adam from Eve’s own viewpoint, Milton embraced this challenge and at the same time undertook to answer the questions posed by the biblical account of the creation of Eve, exploiting the interpretative possibilities embedded in Genesis. If, after her creation from his rib, she was brought to Adam, then this would suggest a short period of separation while he continued in the deep sleep into which he had fallen. Having Eve wake to life entirely alone allows her to experience a sense of self separate from her relationship to Adam, and thereby encourages the reader to see her as a fully integrated human being, not just in terms of Adam’s response to her. The significance of this narrative decision is difficult to exaggerate. By giving to Eve a voice and allowing her to speak of her own first experience, Milton surprises the reader into a hitherto unimagined viewpoint on an all too familiar story. This freedom of perspective is crucial, and marks the poem as a post-medieval work. Far from a static frieze, the poem is a huge living space, a

While Ovid omits the myth of Pandora, the aetiological creation myth that blames woman for all the miseries of human life, the story of Pygmalion’s ivory statue coming to life is embedded in a misogynistic context since her creation is expressly prompted by the sculptor’s revulsion at the number of vices women have by nature (offensus vitiis, quae plurima menti / femineae natura dedit, Met. X.244–5). However, it should be noted that the narrator at this point is not Ovid but Orpheus: the latter’s attitude to women is soured as a result of his guilt at having failed Eurydice. (See Chapter 6 for further discussion of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.)


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Renaissance masterpiece of interlocking, overlapping perspectives, each different, each telling the same tale differently. Eve’s telling of her own story, from her own point of view, is enough to jolt us out of our accustomed mode of response; it is subtler, but comparable in its breathtaking originality of effect to opening the poem with Satan at his most magnificent, most human and charismatic. In Sylvester’s Du Bartas, as in Genesis, the question of whether or not Eve will be willing to fulfil the role for which she has been created as a “help meet” for Adam simply does not arise; incompatibility of feeling is not even acknowledged as a possibility. In Paradise Lost, however, we do not find a generic type, “Woman,” with a capital letter, but rather, as the use of Eve’s personal name throughout implies, an autonomous individual whose acceptance of Adam cannot, unlike the consent of Pygmalion’s nameless bride, be unquestioningly assumed. Milton’s Eve has a voice and a will of her own. This said, Eve’s very first words as a speaking character in the epic are entirely self-effacing, and seem to promise complete devotion to Adam at the expense of any personal integrity and personality when she addresses him thus: “O thou for whom / And from whom I was formd flesh of thy flesh, / And without whom am to no end, my Guide / And Head,” answering his words with an echo-like responsiveness, “what thou has said is just and right” (IV.440–443). However, a rather different impression is created as she smoothly and unhesitatingly takes over the initiative in the exchange between them, and begins to rehearse her autobiographical anecdote in a relaxed and assured manner.10 It is a passage worth quoting in full: That day I oft remember, when from sleep I first awak’t, and found myself repos’d Under a shade of flours, much wondring where And what I was, whence thither brought, and how. Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound Of waters issu’d from a Cave, and spread Into a liquid Plain, then stood unmov’d, Pure as th’ expanse of Heav’n; I thither went With unexperienc’t thought, and laid me downe On the green bank, to look into the cleer It should be stressed that this goes directly contrary to tradition; according to the commentators, who laid great stress upon this point, the name “Eve” was given by Adam to his wife only after the Fall; “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (Gen. III.20). Newton is clearly alluding to this traditional view when he remarks that, before the Fall, Eve is only so called “by way of anticipation” since until that point she had simply been called “Woman, because she was taken out of ... Man” (note to XI.159). 10 It is worth comparing the effect of IV.635–56. In reply to Adam’s injunction to rest, Eve’s woodenly didactic response, “My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst / Unargu’d I obey ...” (635–6), unexpectedly modulates into the exquisitely lyrical inset poem: “With thee conversing I forget all time ...” (639–56). This “echoing song of love” is, as Martz pointed out, “a remarkable show-piece that concentrates in sixteen lines certain techniques of repetition and reversal that are reminiscent of the Ovidian style” (220–221).


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Smooth Lake, that to me seemd another Skie. As I bent down to look, just opposite, A Shape within the watry gleam appeerd, Bending to look on me: I started back, It started back, but pleas’d I soon returnd, Pleas’d it returnd as soon with answering looks Of sympathie and love; there I had fixt Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warnd me, What thou seest, What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thy self, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow staies Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces, hee Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy Inseparablie thine, to him shalt beare Multitudes like thy self, and thence be call’d Mother of human Race. (IV.449–75)

Although no explicit comparison is drawn between the two, readers from the earliest editors onwards have recognized here the obvious and open application to Eve’s first memories of Ovid’s story of Narcissus, and his obsessive love for his own reflection in the water. Milton’s strategic deployment of Eve as internal narrator at this point creates a subtle means of re-working the familiar story, filtering the myth through the individual perspective of the speaker. The myth is clearly instrumental in articulating the experience – unique to Adam and Eve as the first human beings, and to Pygmalion’s bride too, of course – of coming to consciousness as fully formed adults, of being brought to life without self-knowledge and encountering the world with “unexperienc’t thought” (IV.457). II Eve comes to life full of wonder, but it is not unfocused amazement; the beginnings of self-awareness are shown by her intellectual curiosity as she immediately concerns herself with a number of pressing questions: “where / And what I was, whence thither brought, and how” (IV.451–2). When she recalls speculating about “what” rather than “who” she was, the more experienced Eve, narrating the episode retrospectively, is drawing a distinction between her current state of selfknowledge and her then only emergent consciousness.11 Coming upon her reflection in the water just after her creation, Eve naturally assumes that it is another being; 11

Eve’s subjectivity is partly a linguistic effect: although describing an episode in which her silence throughout is notable, Eve uses “I” thirteen times and “we” (referring to Adam and herself) only once. In Adam’s first speech of the epic, which is mainly concerned with their continuing happiness in the garden, the delights of mutuality are emphasized: Adam makes no use of the first person singular, but refers throughout to Eve and himself as a unit (“us”), the recipients of God’s bounty. McChrystal has charted how “Eve’s use of self-referential pronouns shows a process of self-construction before the Fall” (497).


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she lacks the experience or guidance which would inform her that the evidence provided by her senses may be misleading, prompting such a mistake. The confusing testimony of her senses is reinforced by the nature of her surroundings: the reflective properties of the water render sky and lake indistinguishable.12 The landscape itself seems uncommunicative: the only “voice” to be heard is the “murmuring sound” (IV.453) of water that commands her attention. A number of critics have commented on the “womb-like” nature of this environment in which Eve, as yet speechless, finds it difficult to distinguish between her self and the world outside herself.13 Indeed, Milton’s creative adaptation of the story of Narcissus to convey Eve’s first experience was immediately acclaimed as improving upon the original tale in the Metamorphoses. Patrick Hume, who produced the first full commentary on Paradise Lost in 1695, was one of the first to defend Milton’s usage of the myth on the grounds that it was, “much more probable that a Person who had never seen any thing like her self, should be in love with her own faint reflected Resemblance, than that a Man acquainted with the World and himself, should be undone by so dull a dotage” (note to IV.461).14 Even Sandys seems to have found that Ovid’s myth strained the bounds of credibility for he cites Pausanias’ expostulation: “But how absurd is it to believe, that any should be so distracted or besotted with affection, as not to distinguish a shadow from a substance?” and then proceeds to outline Pausanias’ own version of the tale with its strongly rationalistic bias. In this account, Narcissus had fallen in love with his twin sister, “so exceeding like as hardly distinguishable”; after her death, Narcissus had “repaired oft” to a fountain for solace, “much satisfying his affection in gazing therein, as not beholding his owne shaddow, but the image of his dead sister” (159). Sandys seems to favour this attempt at a more reasonable explanation of Narcissus’ strange infatuation by closing this section of his commentary with a short disquisition on “the miraculous likenesse of twins” of which “all ages have afforded examples” (160). The more knowing and insightful Ovid makes imaginative sense of the story. By innovatively coupling the story of Echo with that of Narcissus in a way that brings out the complementary nature of both, he multiplies the possibilities for complex thematic interplay between reflection and echo, sameness and otherness, shadow and substance. As the reflection that Narcissus beholds in the pool has no substance of its own, but is wholly dependent on the youth, so Echo is a separate individual, but her speech is wholly dependent upon what Narcissus says. Juno had 12 Ricks helpfully points out how the effect of “indistinguishable commingling” is achieved “not only by the explicit comparisons, but also by the syntactical mingling in a ‘sound ... spread into a liquid Plain’” (101). See too, Roberta Martin (69) and Zimmerman (248–9). 13 Most notably, Norford refers to an “oceanic womb-like state in which one does not distinguish between self and the world” (1978, 12); see too, Roberta Martin (69). 14 Following Hume’s lead, Newton, in his note on the passage, adjudged it: “much more probable and natural, as well as more delicate and beautiful, than the famous story of Narcissus in Ovid from which our author manifestly took the hint.”

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deprived Echo of the capacity to initiate conversation, reducing her to only “vocis ... brevissimus usus” (‘ “the briefest use of speech,” ’ Met. III.367); the jealous goddess felt this to be a fitting punishment for engaging her longo ... sermone (“in lengthy conversation,” Met. III.364), when she might have caught Echo’s fellow nymphs in their amatory escapades with her philandering husband. The naturally talkative nymph is frustratingly compelled to wait on others to speak since she can only reproduce their final words; thus her every word is dependent on what is said to her, and she has no true speech of her own. Echo falls in love with the beautiful Narcissus, and begins to stalk him, waiting for an opportunity to overcome her silence and voice her desire. When an opening does arise – with more than a little help from Ovid – Echo seizes the opportunity to impress her own meaning upon his words, wresting them from their original purpose into an invitation to love.15 Separated from his hunting companions, Narcissus calls out loud: ... “ecquis adest?” et “adest” responderat Echo. hic stupet, utque aciem partes dimittit in omnes, voce “veni” magna clamat: vocat illa vocantem. respicit et rursus nullo veniente “quid” inquit “me fugis?” et totidem, quot dixit, verba recepit. perstat et alternae deceptus imagine vocis “huc coeamus” ait, nullique libentius umquam responsura sono “coeamus” rettulit Echo, et verbis favet ipsa suis egressaque silva ibat, ut iniceret sperato bracchia collo. ille fugit fugiensque “manus conplexibus aufer! ante” ait “emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri.” retullit illa nihil nisi “sit tibi copia nostri.” (Met. III.380–92) ... “Is anyone here?” and Echo answered “Here!” Amazed he darted his glance in every direction, and he cried out in a loud voice “Come!” She cried out the word again. He looked behind and, again when no one came, said, “Why do you run from me?” And he received back just those words that he had said. He stood still and, cheated by the likeness of an answering voice, he said, “Here, come and join me!” and Echo, never more willing to give her response, answered, “Come and join me!” And she herself furthered her words by running out of the wood to throw her arms around his longed for neck. He bolted, and as he ran off, he shouted, “Keep your hands off me! I’ll die before I yield to you.” And all she answered was “I yield to you.”

While Echo offers herself to Narcissus without reservation, Narcissus is so intent on denying himself to others that he proclaims his determination to die rather than give himself to Echo. After Narcissus has ruthlessly repelled her advances, 15 Consider, for instance, coeamus in line 386 where Ovid exploits the potential ambiguity in coire (to get together). Narcissus suggests they “get together” to become better acquainted, but Echo wants to “get together” by joining with him in sexual intercourse.


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Echo pines away at being so cruelly rejected. Narcissus’ failure to notice the way Echo’s words exactly mirror his own speech, prepares the reader for his inability to comprehend the phenomenon of his reflection in the pool.16 Moreover, given that Echo, who reproduces his words so exactly, proves to be a separate individual, Narcissus’ expectation that the image in the pool will prove to be another person seems, in the terms established by the narrative, to be less patently absurd. As we shall see, Echo as well as Narcissus seems to have exercised a shaping influence on Milton’s poem. III The selective interplay between the story remembered from Ovid and the present text is at its most brilliant as Narcissus and Eve both gaze at the reflection in the pool. Narcissus’ peculiar status of being at once lover and beloved, subject and object of desire, and the blurring of such distinctions, is reinforced by a dazzling sequence of mirroring effects in the hemistichs of these lines and by the way in which, as DuRocher has pointed out: “All the verbs, active and passive, return to ‘ipse’ (himself),” (90–91): cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse. se cupit inprudens et, qui probat, ipse probatur, dumque petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet. (Met. III.424–6) He gazes in admiration at what makes him the object of an admiring gaze. Unsuspectingly, he longs for himself and he approves himself just as he is approved, and pursues as he is pursued. And love he kindles as much as with love he burns.

Eve’s attraction to the responsiveness of her reflected image, the “answering looks / Of sympathie and love” is suggested syntactically by the mirroring of subject and image along the line of symmetry at the end of two successive verses: “I started back / It started back,” and “pleas’d I soon returnd, / Pleas’d it returnd as soon” (IV.462–5). In accordance with the purpose for which she has been created, Eve reveals here her nature to give “sympathie and love,” but ironically, because of her removal from Adam’s side, such feelings have become deflected away from him; her innately loving disposition is turned upon itself in sterile recursion, echoing itself only. Narcissus too experiences the illusion of perfect mutuality, and speaks wiser than he is aware of when he observes aloud: “Thou smil’st my smiles: when I a teare let fall, / Thou shedd’st an other; and consent’st in all” (Sandys; Met. III.454– 5). Drawing false conclusions from the mirror effect, he imagines there to be a sympathetic communion between himself and another, whereas, in fact, every 16 As Fantham has pointed out, the expression, imago vocis (cf. Met. III.385) “denotes an echo or aural reflection” just as imago is used of “a reflection or visual echo” (45).

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apparent response is self-generated. Unlike Narcissus, Eve does not address the figure she sees in the lake – she has yet to find her voice – but nevertheless attempts to communicate with her reflection, which apparently responds to her sentiments with “answering looks / Of sympathie and love” (emphasis added). In withholding her voice at this point, Milton proves a kindlier Juno; Eve’s silent self-encounter seems touchingly naive, expressive of her natural warmth and gentleness, where words could so easily have been over-stated and lent themselves to misprision. There are other notable changes of emphasis in the two accounts. Once again Milton forgoes the opportunity to include a blazon that might objectify Eve in the reader’s eyes. Narcissus, in contrast, transfixed with wonder at the beauty of his own reflection, stands immobilized, looking to the observer just like e Pario formatum marmore signum (“a statue sculpted from Parian marble,” Met. III.419). Smitten with longing, he ironically catalogues his own flawless features in the most hyperbolic terms as he gazes upon ... sua limina, sidus et dignos Baccho, dignos et Apolline crines inpubesque genas et eburnea colla decusque oris et in niveo mixtum candore ruborem. (Met. III.420–423) ... his eyes like stars, and his hair, worthy of Bacchus, worthy of Apollo; his smooth cheeks, his ivory neck, the beauty of his face, the blush mingled with snowy white.

The nature of the response is thus very different in each case: whereas Eve is primarily concerned with seeking a relationship, Narcissus raptly objectifies himself, reducing himself to a catalogue of physical attributes to be admired at a distance. In keeping with his curse to prefer mere image to reality, Narcissus’ instinct is always to hold himself at a remove from any real contact. Milton’s readers have reacted in markedly different ways to the mirror scene in Paradise Lost: Stevie Davies remarks that Eve’s “experience of being ‘born’ into Eden is disquietingly like a bereavement”; she stresses what she feels to be “the loneliness” and “insecurity” of Eve’s solitary state that is only relieved by playing games with her own reflection (1983, 9). Other critics have gone to the other extreme in placing a more exalted construction on the mood of the passage, and have been “tempted to view Eve as the attainer of a nirvana-like bliss, and to see in her self-contemplation a childlike beauty, a mysterious form of higher consciousness resembling God’s self-contemplation,” as Alvin Snider has observed (316). Milton seems more at pains to contrast Eve’s experience with that of Narcissus. She is startled but delighted to find herself the object of the gaze of another who is, unbeknown to her, herself. However, Narcissus is tormented by the paradox of his situation, the frustration of being so near and yet so far from his beloved: inopem me copia fecit (“my riches make me poor,” Met. III.466; ironically fulfilling his own prophecy when he had rejected Echo’s advances: “ante” ait “emoriar, quam sit tibi


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copia nostri,” Met. III.391).17 He feeds his passion with his eyes, and is literally consumed by an insatiable hunger for himself, wasting away until eventually he too is reduced to insubstantiality and becomes a shade in the Underworld, gazing at a shadow of a shadow in a pool.18 Eve, however, feels no such sense of incompleteness or lack: she finds her situation entirely absorbing and is delighted by her innocent, because at this point ignorant, flirtation with her reflection in the lake.19 Eve is only incidentally narcissistic, Narcissus, essentially so. Caught in a self-enclosed loop, she is, of course, both author and recipient of the looks she desires to find in another. It is only in retrospect that Eve is in a position to recognize the risk of entrapment and acknowledge what would otherwise have been her fate, had a mysterious voice not prompted her to leave the water: “there I had fixt / Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire” (IV.465–6). It is an observation that, as it were, answers Narcissus’ rhetorical question of the silent woods that surround him: “ecquem, cum vestrae tot agantur saecula vitae, / qui sic tabuerit, longo meministis in aevo?” (“ ‘[Alas, ye woods] Can you remember anyone in all your time so long / That hath so pined away as I?’ ” Met. III.444–5; Golding III.558–9). Through this deft manoeuvre, it is Narcissus who is made to seem a “type” of Eve rather than the other way round. If we regard Milton as the author of Eve’s lines, then the source text from Ovid is obviously temporally anterior; however, if we regard these as the actual words spoken by the first woman on earth, then a chronology emerges in which her experience has temporal priority, and the so-called source text has been cleverly anticipated.20 This is subtle and masterful: Milton, in drawing so deeply from Ovid, also supersedes and displaces the earlier poet, covertly usurping his primacy. IV Milton’s rendition of the tale diverges more significantly from Ovid’s account when the silence is broken by a disembodied warning voice. In the Metamorphoses, it is the narrator himself who vainly remonstrates with Narcissus; in Paradise Lost, it is the voice of Eve’s “Heav’nly Maker” (VIII.485) who effectively breaks the spell of her self-absorption. Narcissus, unlike Eve, cannot, naturally enough, hear The verbal play is difficult to reproduce in an English translation: copia ranges in meaning from “abundance” and “riches” to “give access to” or “power over” someone or something. 18 As Knoespel points out, the imagery of wax exposed to heat, or frost to the sun, shows that Narcissus is “quite literally being consumed” or is “melting away” (1985, 17). Milton seems to recycle this idea to a certain extent when, with the onset of sleep for the first time, Adam imagines that he might pass out of existence “forthwith to dissolve” (VIII.291). 19 Compare Kerrigan and Braden (39–40). 20 In any event, there is a deep irony here in that Narcissus is oblivious to the fate of the lovelorn Echo who has wasted away on his account (Met. III.395–401): Ovid’s reader might not be as forgetful as the self-centred and egotistical Narcissus. 17


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the warning voice of his author, who seems impelled to intervene personally on his character’s behalf, as he gestures towards saving Narcissus in an ironically futile attempt to avert the catastrophe that must overtake his creation: credule, quid frustra simulacra fugacia captas? quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes. ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est: nil habet ista sui: tecum venitque21 manetque, tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis. (Met. III.432–6) O Foole! that striv’st to catch a flying shade! Thou seek’st what’s no-where: Turn aside, ’twill fade. Thy formes reflection doth thy sight delude: Which is with nothing of its owne indu’d. With thee it comes; with thee it staies; and so ’Twould goe away, hadst thou the power to goe. (Sandys)

Readers have found it difficult to gauge the tone here: is the narrator “taunting” and “condescending” (DuRocher, 89) in his attitude to Narcissus’ predicament, or is he moved by a genuine sense of pity for one who “easily believes too much”?22 Certainly, the omniscient narrator’s elementary lesson in physics does not open up a genuine possibility of escape for Narcissus; rather it knowingly forecasts his helplessness to leave. How, then, does the divine speaker successfully induce Eve to leave the pool and follow Him? Firstly, He explains the nature of her error in a way that acknowledges both her subjectivity and her beauty as well as at the same time sanctioning her potential for agency and promising the substantiation of her desire: ... What thou seest, What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow staies Thy coming, and thy soft imbraces. (IV.467–71).

Here Adam is imagined as the passive recipient of her embraces. However, what follows immediately insists upon her secondary status as Adam’s image: “hee / James claims that Eve’s “image came and is about to go, unlike Narcissus’s” (133); however, Ovid’s use of venit here is not a present tense, though it may be more naturally translated by one (“comes,” as in the translation supplied from Sandys). Martindale also makes a valuable observation about the sequence of tenses in Milton and Ovid: “the slight awkwardness in the tenses of ‘With thee it came and goes’ (469), which gives the words a curious Miltonic power, is due to exact imitation of the tenses of the Ovidian original (434– 6) ... Milton is perhaps tacitly correcting, with a kind of passionate pedantry not untypical of him, the translation of Sandys which renders vēnit by a present tense” (1985, 167). 22 Regius responds to the passage in this way, glossing credulus thus, rather than as “fool” in his commentary on the passage (Moss, 55). 21


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Whose image thou art” (IV.471–2). Accordingly, Eve discovers herself to be the shadow to Adam’s substance, the copy to his original, and consequently the figure, which she sees in the lake, is but a reflection of a reflection, at least two removes from this ultimate reality. Christine Froula draws out the apparent implications of this fully: Eve is required to ... abandon not merely her image in the pool but her very self – a self subtly discounted by the explaining “voice,” which equates it with the insubstantial image in the pool: “What there thou seest ... is thyself.” The reflection is not of Eve: according to the voice, it is Eve. As the voice interprets her to herself, Eve is not a self, a subject, at all; she is rather a substanceless image, a mere “shadow” without object until the voice unites her to Adam – “hee / Whose image thou art” – much as Wendy stitches Peter Pan to his shadow. (1983, 328)

Nevertheless, it is at this point that the polarity unexpectedly reverses again, as Adam becomes an object of desire that Eve can possess and enjoy: “him thou shall enjoy / Inseparablie thine” (IV.472–3). Not only does her Maker offer Eve an additional incentive in the form of an annunciation of her more exalted status as “Mother of human Race” (IV.475), but He does so in a way that seems to involve her in the primary act of creation by promising that she will multiply her own image in bearing: “Multitudes like thy self” (IV.474, my emphasis). James Earl hammers the point home: “they are specifically promised as her image, not Adam’s, not theirs” (16). As Barbara Lewalski has remarked, Eve’s account complicates the reading of her story as the simple submission to patriarchy that some critics have assumed it to be: “As she recounts the words spoken to her by God, she almost concludes that God made Adam for her, not vice versa, and he instituted matriarchy, not patriarchy” (2000, 483). This is not a tangential complexity but one that anticipates a number of future developments.23 Superficially, Eve as Adam’s “image” is less real, less of a person, than her original – she is Adam’s echo, but the deeper currents of the poem belie such a facile Platonism. In one sense, Eve as Adam’s image may seem secondary, but she is no less herself, no less real for her Maker. The true Creator triumphs when His creatures are not merely echoes of his will: Eve is no automaton, but a living being with a soul, a unique, irreplaceable creation.24 That God Himself should courteously persuade her to accept his guidance, rather than simply controlling her actions, like a puppet-master rearranging the pose of one of His figures, argues her irreducible being. Eve need not share the fate of Narcissus: unlike Ovid’s narrator, her instructor can offer an alternative to self-enthralment – the possibility of loving someone 23

Chapters 4, 5 and 7, in particular, examine the way the actual distribution of power in the relationship complicates and qualifies, if not challenges and subverts, any single authorised version of male superiority and female inferiority. 24 Only after she has fallen does Eve fear that she may be expendable and easily replaced by “another Eve” (IX.828).


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other than herself, a possibility that Narcissus had already rejected. In place of a life of barren self-absorption, her Maker can promise to Eve a tangible presence for an empty shadow, and the means to satisfy her yearning for love with substantial embraces; indeed her reminiscences to Adam will conclude with the first couple both blissfully, “Imparadis’t in one anothers arms” (IV.506). V It has, of course, been persuasively argued by Diane Kelsey McColley (1983, 81–2), among others, that the function of Eve’s separation from Adam in Milton’s account had been to ensure that their marriage is seen to be the result of Eve’s own free choice as well as the lonely Adam’s desire for a companion. This line of thought is supported by Giovanni Diodati’s gloss on the apposite line from Genesis, “And brought her to the man” (Gen. II.22), where, he explains, God acts: “As a mediator, to cause her voluntarily to espouse her self to Adam and to confirm and sanctify that conjunction.” Commenting on this “happy ending,” Mary Nyquist concludes: “Grounded in illusion, Eve’s desire for an other self is therefore thoroughly appropriated by a patriarchal order, with the result that in Paradise Lost’s recasting of Ovid’s tale of Narcissus, Eve’s illusion is not only permitted but destined to pass away” (122). However, if we allow Eve to resume her story, this movement from illusion to reality is not as straightforward as Nyquist suggests. Eve recalls to Adam how she felt compelled to follow the lead of her invisible guide: Till I espi’d thee, fair indeed and tall, Under a Platan, yet methought, less faire, Less winning soft, less amiablie milde, Then that smooth watry image; back I turnd. (IV.477–80)

But on first encountering Adam, Eve deliberately turns back to the illusory selfimage in the water that she now knows to be herself, just as Narcissus had done: ad faciem rediit male sanus eandem (“half distraught, he turned again to the same face,”; Met. III.474), even after his climactic realization that the face he saw there was his own: “iste ego sum! sensi; nec me mea fallit imago.” (Met. III.463) “That person is me! I felt it; nor does my image deceive me.”25

What are we to make of this?

25 I am grateful to Richard DuRocher for pointing out to me how nec me ... fallit is more convoluted syntactically and emotionally guarded than the simple acknowledgement, “I know.”


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Before attempting to answer this intriguing question, it is perhaps a good point at which to pause and consider the risk Milton took in aligning the newly created Eve with a figure who had become emblematic of pride and vanity.26 According to Golding: “Narcissus is of scornfulness and pride a mirror clear / Where beauty’s fading vanity most plainly may appear” (“Epistle of 1567,” 105–6). Moreover, narcissistic self-regard is not apparently associated with the human race in general but is found to be paradigmatic of the nature of woman.27 In a deliberately reductive reading, Davies comments on the apparent misogyny that lies behind the linkage: [Milton] shows Eve as flawed from her inception; scarcely is she out of the metaphorical cradle than she is ogling her own image and making energetic efforts to evade the legitimate embraces of her husband. Eve is thought of as revealing woman’s lack of discrimination (some of her brain-cells are clearly missing from the start), and in terms of the Narcissus motif an emblem of Vanity which will be her downfall. (1983, 4)

While it is worth remembering that in anticipation of the Narcissus episode, Nature herself is pictured holding a “chrystal mirror” (IV.263), Eve, unlike Narcissus, does not use the reflective properties of the water to linger in admiration over her beautiful features, nor, unlike Salmacis – the Ovidian water nymph whose typical pose is to recline on the grassy margin of her pool, using it as a looking glass to check her appearance28 – is Eve ever caught paying conscious attention to her beauty or self-consciously considering what look might best become her.29 Until recently, critics tended to be disposed into two main camps: those, like John Peter, who tried to purge the Ovidian overlay of any unwelcome associations entirely, preferring to view Eve’s initial attraction to her reflection as “only one instance of the many revelations Milton gives of [Eve’s] charm

26

As Knott has observed: “It is a rare critic who does not touch on the narcissism of Eve’s fascination with her image in the lake” (1971, 109). However, the moral customarily extracted from this myth only converges with Eve when Satan either instils narcissistic desires in her or arouses narcissistic longings latent within her. For further discussion of these competing possibilities, see Chapter 4. 27 Clement of Alexandria made the connection, but directed his attack specifically against the application of make-up. He inveighed against those who “turn their faces into masks,” having “invented mirrors for this artificial shape of theirs, as if it were some excellent work or masterpiece ... For as the Greek fable has it, it was not a fortunate thing for the beautiful Narcissus to have been the beholder of his own image” (The Instructor III. 2, Ante-Nicene Christian Library IV. 280–81). 28 See Met. IV.308–12; contrast Daphne seen through the eyes of Phoebus Apollo in Met. I.497–502. The chaste nymph has a simple, natural beauty – she is characteristically neglectful of her appearance, allowing her hair to blow loose in the breeze. 29 It is only after eating the fruit that Eve self-consciously constructs herself, “But to Adam in what sort / Shall I appeer?” (IX.816–17).

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and femininity” (102),30 and those, like Douglas Bush, who argued that Milton’s “preparation for the Fall begins here with Eve’s speech” (1964, 160). Those critics that have been concerned to establish a proleptic reading of the episode have focused on the way it provides a “repository of doubt for later exploitation.”31 They either emphasize the way in which Eve’s error in believing her reflection to be another person “foreshadows her later credulity,”32 or, more frequently and damagingly, the way her admiration for her reflection betrays a “faint trace of latent vanity and self-centredness.”33 Both of these branches of the proleptic reading seek to expose weaknesses that are later exploited in full by Satan, the metamorphic fallen angel who is, unbeknown to Eve and Adam, eaves-dropping on this intimate and private audience in the guise of a cormorant.34 Readers are now so familiar with such narrative foreshadowing that other possibilities are too easily left out of account. It should not be forgotten that ever since Ovid’s treatment of the myth, the haunting image of Narcissus gazing vainly at his reflection and withering away in fruitless self-absorption has fascinated writers, artists and, more latterly, analysts alike. Narcissus’ inability to go beyond himself is emphatically established in Ovid’s version of the story: Narcissus scorns male and female admirers alike and then suffers his strange fate in retributive justice as a punishment for his unyielding pride: multi illum iuvenes, multae cupiere puellae; sed (fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma) nulli illum iuvenes, nullae tetigere puellae. (Met. III.353–5) 30 Nicolson too insists that, “It seems entirely possible to explain Eve’s supposed ‘narcissism’ by saying that Eve was still an infant – just now created – and her experience was that of any child for the first time noticing its reflection in mirror or water” (242). 31 Giamatti (316). Similarly, Bell remarks: “we have glimpsed a dainty vanity in ‘our general Mother’ which the Serpent will put to use” (871). 32 Kelley (150), and, more recently, Cheung (202). 33 Bush (1961, 638). Stein notes ominously how Eve’s “first recorded act is one that flirts with self-love” (92–3), while Day goes further to suggest that she is flawed from the outset by unequivocally asserting that Eve reveals an “innate vanity and resistance to teaching” here (378). More recently, McCabe has claimed that “Eve’s vanity is not a compatible behaviour with the prelapsarian world” (73). Such a position is reminiscent of Tillyard’s claim that Adam and Eve are “virtually fallen before the official temptation has begun” (1951, 13). As Fish has concluded, “the reader cannot possibly ... ignore the problem (the eighteenth-century commentators were already debating it) once the Ovidian allusion is recognized. The presence of Narcissus, even at a remove, is a puzzle” (218–9). Nevertheless, the ambiguity inherent in the expression “vain desire” (IV.466) is clearly calculated, for had Milton wished to portray Eve as vain to the point of being narcissistic, he could have made use of the tradition, popularized by Peter Comestor, that for the temptation Satan chose quoddam genus serpentis ... virgineum vultum habens, quia similia similibus applaudunt (“a certain kind of serpent ... which had the countenance of a virgin, because like favours like”) as cited by Cheung (note 5, 212). 34 See Chapters 4 and 6 for further discussion of the way Satan puts to use the knowledge he gains by overhearing Eve’s conversation with Adam.


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Many youths and many girls desired him; but in that soft form was a pride so hard that no youths, no girls touched his heart.

These lines demonstrate Ovid’s creative use of verbal patterning in which the lines are syntactically arranged to enact the idea they express. The three lines are full of mirroring effects, exercising a proleptic function that prefigures the whole narrative in miniature. The first and last lines are neatly reflected across the middle line of verse which thereby forms the line of symmetry: iuvenes and puellae are contrasted in the first and last line, while multi / multae in the first line are negated by nulli / nullae of the last line. Interposed between these carefully balanced lines is the parenthesis in line 354 which is placed between them to render the frustration of desire (cupiere / tetigere) by arrogant disdain (superbia) and to suggest how, literally and metaphorically, the young men and women cannot get through to the self-enclosed Narcissus. The middle line is itself an example of studied symmetry in which the taut chiastic arrangement emphasizes the antithesis of tenera and dura: the promise inherent in Narcissus’ soft beauty is negated by his hard and unyielding pride.35 The scene is carefully set by Ovid in a beautifully pointed, ecphrastic set piece: fons erat inlimis, nitidis argenteus undis, quem neque pastores neque pastae monte capellae contigerant aliudve pecus, quem nulla volucris nec fera turbarat nec lapsus ab arbore ramus. (Met. III.407–10) There was a spring withouten mud as silver clear and still, Which neither shepherds, nor the goats that fed upon the hill, Nor other cattle troubled had, nor savage beast had stirred, Nor branch, nor stick, nor leaf of tree, nor any fowl nor bird. (Golding III.509–12)

But this locus amoenus – the pleasant place or beauty spot, conventionally the setting for lovers’ embraces – is only deceptively attractive. Except for the silvery brightness of the water, the entire passage is couched in negatives. True, the water is unusually reflective because undisturbed; but there is something a little sinister about the utter lack of life. The pool is virgin territory; like Narcissus himself, it has never been touched. The absence of sunlight and warmth, though refreshing, further correspond to the coldness of the youth. The locus amoenus is characteristically “a beautiful, shaded natural site,” as E. R. Curtius notes in his classic discussion of this narrative topos (195), but this pool, hemmed about by trees where the sun can barely penetrate, develops an atmosphere of lifelessness 35 Interestingly, neither Golding nor Sandys pick up on this hard/soft dichotomy in their translations of the lines from Ovid, but it becomes an important thematic motif in Milton’s account (see Chapter 7).


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and sterility.36 All the visual details coalesce to form a single symbolic expression of Narcissus’ own solipsistic enclosure. The remote, untouched and secluded place that benefits neither man nor beast becomes emblematic of the negative quality of Narcissus’ own beautiful self-sufficiency: like his statuesque beauty (Met. III.419), it lacks warmth and movement. The scene that Eve invites us to view is significantly different:37 the emphasis here falls upon the open aspect of the setting: the water spreads out into a broad expanse or “liquid Plain” (IV.455)38 rather than remaining contained in a pool or pond. The open prospect in Paradise Lost adumbrates the way that Eve herself will not ultimately remain self-enclosed. Nevertheless, Eve caught in the reflection of this Ovidian myth does make an indelible impression, and what follows should surely take part of its significance from this aspect of the Ovidian connection. If Milton initially used the Ovidian echo to establish Eve’s unique state of nescience, the extension of the comparison here, as she returns to the lake in the knowledge that this other Eve is but her own reflection, must encourage the reader to include the association of Narcissus as the archetypal symbol of destructive self-love, who lived a sterile life and involved Echo in his own ruin. Milton has reversed the sequence of events in Ovid: Narcissus first spurns Echo and all other overtures made to him, then suffers his fate in retributive justice; Eve likewise rejects Adam but after judging him wanting, “less faire / Less winning soft, less amiablie milde” (IV.478–9, emphases added) than the soft feminine image in the water that she now knows to be herself. As Nyquist has observed, “by means of the Narcissus myth, Paradise Lost is able to represent her experiencing a desire equivalent or complementary to the lonely Adam’s desire for an ‘other self’” (120). However, as Eve appraises Adam’s firm contours and muscular form, so unlike the inviting softness of the image in the lake, it is difference that she registers, and she rejects him. Eve may be Adam’s “hearts desire” (VIII.451), but he does not, at least according to first impressions, seem to have been hers. Narcissism, as a psychological or spiritual condition, may be interpreted as excessive self-love, but also as a flawed, damaging identification of self with external appearances. And thus Narcissus, loving his image, wastes away and becomes as nothing. By deliberately prolonging the Narcissus echo, Milton suggests it is not just the first stage of self, to fear the different, the contingent and real, but that it is a continuing temptation, because always easier, more flatteringly seductive, than 36

Pferrer notes how: “Medieval commentators associated various qualities with the narcissus as flower which reiterate this idea of lifelessness, for the narcissus is described as beautiful, yet useless, a flower which is sterile and withers after a short time, exuding a soporific or poisonous perfume” (18). 37 See DuRocher (86–7). 38 It seems not without significance that Milton uses here the very same expression that Sandys had adopted to contrast the waters in the open sea with that confined by river banks, in mare perveniunt partim campoque recepta / liberioris aquae pro ripis litora pulsant (Met. I.41–2): “When in that liquid Plaine, with freer wave, / The foamie Cliffes, in stead of Banks, they lave.”


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the challenge of loving another human being with ultimately unknowable intents and needs. So this little glitch in the story has a large significance; it suggests the possibility of a worrying consonance between Narcissus and Eve. Nevertheless, since after this momentary “homoerotic hesitation,” to use Lewalski’s apt phrase (2000, 483), Eve will, unlike Narcissus, find fulfilment and love, it cannot be altogether denied that the point of the association between the two figures is the contrast rather than the comparison of the final outcome in each case. In spite of this, Eve’s instinctive preference for her own image here is to have a significant bearing on future events, as we shall see. Before we explore this further, it will be worthwhile to pursue the complex of parallels and contrasts that Milton strategically deploys to invite comparison between the two autobiographical narratives recounted by Eve and Adam respectively.39 VI With Eve occupied elsewhere, Adam attempts to prolong the visit of their angelic guest by offering an account of his own first moments of consciousness. The creation of Eve and their first meeting are this time focalized through Adam’s own distinct perspective. Adam comes to life and looks up directly towards the heavens. He stands upright and, without a reflective surface to hand, surveys his body in parts, “Limb by Limb” (VIII.267). Physically active by nature, he flexes his muscles and, endowed with an immediate sense of selfhood though not identity, he is conscious of being separate and distinct from his surroundings: “But who I was, or where, or from what cause, / Knew not” (VIII.270–271). Unlike Eve, Adam instinctively speaks aloud, reasoning that he has been brought to life by some “power præeminent” (VIII.279). He addresses the world in his quest for self-knowledge and knowledge of this “great Maker” (VIII.278): but “answer none return’d” (VIII.285). The uncommunicative landscape that offers not even an echo in reply intimates Adam’s growing sense of lonely isolation. This is reinforced during Adam’s first direct encounter with his Creator. While all kinds of living creatures process in pairs before him to acknowledge their fealty, Adam experiences an increasingly keen sense of lack: “but in these / I found not what me thought I wanted still” (VIII.354–5).40 Adam’s most intense experience is of insufficiency; in comparison with his Maker, he remarks upon 39

A number of critics have drawn attention to the strategic deployment of a network of comparisons and contrasts between the two accounts, including: Quilligan (227–8); Froula (1983, 330–333); Cheung (201–2); Roberta Martin (67–74). 40 This is in pointed contrast to Marvell’s conception of Paradise where, “Two paradises ’twere in one, / To live in paradise alone” (The Garden, 51–2). James Stone has argued that: “In the world of Milton’s Paradise Lost there exists an implicit imbalance between the sexes, in that man suffers a wrenching sense of differential lack, whereas woman is apparently more self-sufficient and independent of the other sex” (33). See too, Morrissey, especially 332.


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his own “single imperfection” (VIII.423), recognizing himself to be “In unitie defective” (VIII.425).41 Unlike Eve, Adam finds the weight of his solitude oppressive: “In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?” (VIII.365–7). A number of significant details in these two accounts evidently serve to reinforce the ontological hierarchy of male and female deemed so crucial to Milton’s purposes: Adam regards the heavens directly, not mediated through a watery reflection; speech and an upright posture seem more naturally his; he is privileged to see the “shape Divine” of his Maker (VIII.295), whereas Eve hears only a disembodied voice. However, at the same time, as Lewalski points out: “Adam’s narrative (8.355–99), by contrast [with Eve’s], testifies to a psychological and emotional neediness that in some ways undercuts gender hierarchy” (2000, 483). Recent criticism has drawn attention to the potential for narcissism in Adam’s attitude to Eve.42 Since God had promised Adam that he would find in Eve his “likeness” and his “other self” (VIII.450), Adam understandably tries to claim her as: “Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self / Before me” (VIII.495–6, emphasis added). While primarily designed to suggest the special quality of their union, the terms used by God to describe Adam’s prospective consort43 help to condition Adam’s response to Eve and blur the boundaries between self and other. Unlike Eve, who sees herself in the lake before encountering Adam, he has had no comparable specular experience of his own body, which he has only been able to apprehend piecemeal; the nearest he comes to a complete reflection of himself is Eve: “I now see / ... my Self / Before me” (VIII.494–6). However, as Champagne has noted: Eve is “not just a mirror image for Adam as the ‘shape’ she sees in the water is for her, but a complement, completing him”; it is this “sense of oneness Adam feels with Eve [that] makes him feel whole, complete” (52, 53). Looking ahead, we can see how this leads Adam to misinterpret the nature of the connection between them to the point of claiming total possession of his “other half” (IV.488) so that, once Eve has fallen, he can see no alternative but to fall with her: 41

Although Adam’s Heavenly Maker protests that He is “alone / From all Eternitie, for none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (VIII.405–7), this is not the whole truth; it sidesteps his relationship with the Son: the Son is the “radiant image” of the Father and His “sole complacence” (III.63, 276). Grossman has made an interesting observation regarding the correlative relationship between Eve as the image of Adam, and the Son as the image of the Father. While the Son is “positioned toward the Father as Eve is toward Adam,” he concedes that, “There is, however, a difference. Where the ‘I’ of Eve becomes autonomous once outside the eye of Adam (in the separation scene for example), the Son always perfectly expresses the ‘I’ of the Father, whose eye cannot be evaded” (153). 42 See, for instance, Grossman, 151; James, 134; Champagne, 53; Zimmerman, 250, and notably, Knoespel (1989, 89–95). 43 Compare Milton’s own gloss of the scriptural phrase “help meet” (Gen. II.18): the creation of woman supplies Adam with “another self, a second self, a very self it self” (Tetrachordon, Col. 4.90).


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So forcible within my heart I feel The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our State cannot be severd, we are one, One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self. (IX.955–9)

Adam recognizes in Eve not only sameness but difference too, of course.44 His first impression is that she is, “Manlike, but different Sex,” and this difference is crucially significant too: she is “so lovly faire, / That what seemd fair in all the World” now seemed “summd up” in her (VIII.471–3). In response to Adam’s request for a companion, God had assured him that He would provide: “Thy wish exactly to thy hearts desire” (VIII. 451). The wording of God’s promise suggests Eve is created as the embodiment of Adam’s innermost desires just as Pygmalion and the ivory maid is likewise a story of wish fulfilment45 wherein Venus understood (sensit, Met. X.277) the true meaning of the sculptor’s prayer when he had asked for the living likeness of his statue. Indeed, it is Adam’s version of Eve’s creation that bears marked affinities with this tale from the Metamorphoses. VII The skill of the Ovidian artificer is certainly wondrous, enabling Pygmalion to realize fully his “fore-conceit”46 of the ideal woman. But though convincingly lifelike, it is a lifeless object; Pygmalion’s powers are limited, and it is only through divine agency that his prayers are answered and the statue comes to life. Raphael’s account of the creation of the first man is sparing of detail: Adam is made from “Dust of the ground” (VII.525); in contrast, Adam’s own account of Eve’s creation emphasizes the “hands on” approach of the divine craftsman as with loving care the living bone of Adam’s rib is “formd and fashond with his hands” till “Under his forming hands a Creature grew” (VIII.469–70). The ivory statue is entirely the product of art and has a beauty beyond nature: yet paradoxically, Pygmalion’s artistry conceals itself in the verisimilitude of his 44 In Tetrachordon, where Milton is disposing of the “crabbed opinion” that “manly friendship” would have been preferable company for Adam, he had, with Ovidian ingenuity, drawn out the paradoxical interplay of sameness and difference in the sexes in his conclusion that “the different sexe in most resembling unlikenes, and most unlike resemblance cannot but please best and be pleas’d in the aptitude of that variety” (Col. 4.86). It is not without significance that the renewal of life after the flood is seen to derive from a union of contraries (discors concordia fetibus apta est, Met. I.433), while the fruitlessness of sameness is elaborated at length in the story of Iphis’ homosexual love for Ianthe (Met. IX.718–34). 45 Edwards argues, “Adam’s account implies that Eve” is an “ ‘idealized and objectified’ image ... from the outset” (240). 46 In The Defence of Poesy, Sidney uses this expression to denote the original conception in the artist’s mind to which he attempts to give expression in his work (line 212).

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creation (ars adeo latet arte sua, Met. X.252). Eve too is endowed with an ideal beauty transcending nature and art: fashioned by God’s own hands she is adorned with a “perfet beauty” (IV.635) such that no woman born has since enjoyed: Eve is “the fairest of her Daughters” (IV.324). Divine art is, paradoxically, perfectly natural and needs no enhancement from artificial ornamentation of any kind, as the text continually reminds us when trying to encapsulate the transcendent beauty of Eve’s unclothed form: “Undeckt, save with her self” she is “more lovely fair” (V.380) than any mythological beauty; “in naked beauty” she is nevertheless “more adorn’d” (IV.713) than her descendants who will cultivate the use of cosmetics or surgical enhancement to improve upon nature. A little later, after recalling to Raphael how he had acclaimed Eve as the “fairest” of all his Creator’s gifts (VIII.493), Adam, in a less expansive and more critically reflective mood, shows himself troubled by how he should act upon the differences between himself and Eve. Although he acknowledges “in the prime end / Of Nature her th’inferiour” (VIII.540–541), “resembling less / His Image who made both” (VIII.543–4), he is still clearly uneasy that, compared with himself, Eve seems the product of too much artistry, feeling that on her had been “bestow’d / Too much of Ornament, in outward shew / Elaborate” (VIII.537–9). John Simons’ reading of the mirror motif would consign Eve to insignificance without Adam: “The woman reflects the self of the man – not her own self. As the mirror waits, signifying nothing till it is filled by our presence, so the woman waits, drained of meaning till she is filled by the signifying presence of the man” (216). However, rather than seeing in Eve the inferior copy of a copy, Adam finds persuasive reasons for viewing her as a perfected version of himself: “As one intended first, not after made / Occasionally” (VIII.555–6), the “last and best / Of all God’s works” (IX.896–7).47 By addressing Eve as “Best image of my self” (V. 95), Adam declares her superiority rather than her inferiority to him. Reflecting upon her “loveliness” leads Adam to confess the way Eve’s beauty interferes with his judgement and complicates his attitude to her: “so absolute she seems / And in her self compleat” (VIII.547–8).48 Significantly, in his highly selective recollection to Raphael of Eve’s creation and his attempts to woo her, Adam misreads her reason for turning back towards the lake. He explains her hesitation not as she herself had done to him, but by projecting onto her an assurance of self-worth. That Eve remains silent in both accounts allows for such divergent readings of the motives for her action. Assuming that Eve’s desire for him must be equivalent to his for her, Adam attributes her turning away from him not to any instinctive aversion or sense of incompatibility on her part, but to “Her vertue and the conscience of her worth” (VIII.502). Having both world enough and time, Eve would, he feels, naturally expect him to acknowledge her value and court her accordingly: she “would be woo’d, and not unsought be won” (VIII.503). 47 The intriguing possibility that woman is the culmination of creation was not without precedent. See Chapter 4 where this is discussed in greater detail. 48 The significance to be attached to Eve’s beauty is explored more fully in Chapter 4.


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Adam cannot reconcile Eve’s apparent self-sufficiency with Raphael’s assurances of his superiority; reason is so disorientated by emotion in Eve’s presence that ... what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Looses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shewes. (VIII.549–53; emphasis added)

These lines point to the source of the challenge that Milton’s Adam faces in his marriage to Eve. Eve may be Adam’s image but she is not simply a shadowy reflection; she is a complete person, an autonomous subject. Once his rib has been fashioned into a separate individual, Adam experiences both the pleasures of marital harmony and the tension of their twoness. Adam may take delight in “all her words and actions mixt with Love / And sweet compliance,” which declare “unfeign’d / Union of Mind, or in us both one Soule” (VIII.602–4), but, as Janet Halley points out, “by the time he says these lines,” Adam has come to realize that “the living harmony of married action depends on Eve’s ‘sweet compliance,’ on her derivation of her will from his” (247)49 Milton takes pains to avoid the impression that Adam’s relationship to Eve is the psychological equivalent of marrying the ivory statue. Milton himself was acutely concerned that ... the bashfull muteness of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unliveliness and naturall sloth which is really unfit for conversation... . When as the sober man honouring the appearance of modesty, and hoping well of every sociall vertue under that veile, may easily chance to meet, if not with a body impenetrable, yet often with a minde to another conversation inaccessible. (Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, I.3; Col. 3.i.394–5)

Elsewhere in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton had maintained that: “a meet and happy conversation” to be “the chiefest and noblest end of marriage” (I.2; Col. 3.ii.391), and in the interchanges between Adam and Eve he demonstrates that to achieve true reciprocity in dialogue, the “fit conversing soul” (I.4; Col. 3.ii.397) combines resourcefulness in initiating discussion as well as responsiveness to speech.50 49

Of course, Adam experiences a jarring reminder of Eve’s inconvenient autonomy in the gardening debate when she fails to yield at his bidding (see Chapter 5). 50 This is in pointed contrast to the lesson preached by Donne at the wedding of Sir Francis Nethersole, where he enjoined upon the bride the traditional Pauline ideal of wifely behaviour, “be content to learn in silence with all subjection,” “Sermon 17: Preached on Genesis 2:18.” As Schoenfeldt has remarked, “The speech of Adam and Eve, like their work in the garden, is surprisingly egalitarian, especially when one considers the premium placed on feminine silence by Milton’s culture” (324); this said, Eve’s readiness to converse with the Satanic serpent seems designed to draw a more ambivalent response from the reader (see Chapter 6, note 30).


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Although Shari Zimmerman has claimed that: “Robbed of a personal voice, Eve is coerced into becoming an echo for Adam. (It is not until Book IX that Eve, no longer responding to or being an echo of Adam’s discourse, successfully initiates a discussion.)” (250), Lewalski has effectively corrected such a partial perspective by observing how: “Both before and after the Fall Eve often proposes issues for discussion, initiates action, and leads in some new direction,” noting that, “When their dialogic interchanges are working properly, Adam, responds to, develops and where necessary corrects Eve’s initiatives” (2000, 482). As DuRocher perceptively concludes, “In the context of Ovid’s myth,” Milton shows “Eve not only as a corrected Narcissus able to escape self-enclosure but also as a perfected Echo able to initiate as well as respond to discourse” (86). Without the gift and risk of free will, and of psychological as well as physical separation from her “author” Adam, God’s ultimate creation would be flawed, Pygmalion’s statue granted living flesh but no real life at all; Milton’s Eve speaks with her own voice, expressive of her own thoughts and desires. While conducting a monologue might be safer, less demanding and easier to manage for Adam, it would be sterile and unproductive. But if the fruitful dynamics of dialogue are preferable to talking at a mirror, they are not without difficulty for Adam. Even before the Fall, Adam is a little unsure of Eve. To some extent, he sees her as his image, an enthralled possession like Pygmalion’s statue, but he is also daunted by the image she presents to him of self-possession and beauty. Superficially the opposite of possessive diminishment, this awe is likewise a displaced narcissism, an inability to really see beyond the surface, as Raphael perceives it: “what admir’st thou, what transports thee so / An outside?” (VIII.567–8). This is not to say that Adam has absolutely no sense of Eve’s real self, rather that he experiences the uncertainty we all face, of not knowing another as immediately as ourselves. His propensity to defer to her beauty and to place her on a pedestal, although it is only a tendency, still incurs Raphael’s displeasure. The ordinarily affable angel insists that Adam’s difficulties are grounded in an illusion – an over-valuing of the significance of Eve’s beauty and an under-valuing of his own worth. For Raphael the situation is simple and clear cut, the solution self-evident: Adam need only act by a proper self-knowledge. He thus cautions against: ... attributing overmuch to things Less excellent, as thou thy self perceav’st. For what admir’st thou, what transports thee so, An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, Not thy subjection …

and exhorts Adam to ... weigh her with thy self; Then value: Oft times nothing profits more Then self esteem, grounded on just and right


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Well manag’d; of that skill the more thou know’st, The more she will acknowledge thee her Head, And to realities yield all her shows. (VIII.565–75)

Adam has to recognize that God has not created in Eve either a mere plaything or an unattainable goddess. Adam must know Eve and not just her surface; to do so he must also know himself: his tendency to idolize Eve51 prevents proper selfknowledge. It is with this crucial lack of self-knowledge that the Son will reproach Adam, and to which He will directly attribute the Fall (X.145–57). VIII Self-knowledge, and the lack thereof, is, of course, a thematic motif central to the story of Narcissus. In an ironic reversal of the famous injunction of the Delphic oracle, nosce teipsum or “know thyself,” Tiresias had cryptically prophezied a long life for the youth, “si se non noverit” (“so that himself he do not know,” Met. III.348; Golding, III.433). Attributing the cause of Narcissus’ downfall to his exceptional physical beauty, this oracular utterance was glossed by the author of the Narrationes52 as: Si pulchritudinis suae nullam habuisset notitiam (“If only the boy had no notion of his own beauty”). But, once he sees and admires “his shadow in the fountaine,” Narcissus is caught by the beauty of appearances, “that is [he] admireth bodily beauty, fraile and like the fluent water,” as Sandys puts it (160). Narcissus is here perceived as moving in the opposite direction to the Platonic lover who is led from body to soul and thence upward to God. Narcissus, in contrast, remains “ensnared by the world of appearances and the beauty of the body, mistaking this for true beauty.”53 Thus Plotinus had alluded to the myth, albeit rather casually, when he exhorted:

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See Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of the implications of this tendency. The Narrationes form the earliest known commentary on the Metamorphoses. In the Renaissance they were incorrectly attributed to Lactantius, and were incorporated into the major editions of the Metamorphoses, such as that of Regius, as prose arguments that preface the actual text of the fable. The quotation here is taken from the fifth in a series of nine glosses devoted to Book III. As Knoespel maintains, the prose gloss “controls the meaning emerging from the text,” functioning “as a filter separating valuable detail from matter judged extraneous or potentially misleading” (1985, 26). 53 Martindale (1985, 313), where he also draws attention to the influential ‘Platonizing’ moralization of the myth by “Ficino in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium (VI.xvii). Narcissus here is the antitype of the Platonic lover: Diotima teaches Socrates to avoid death by leading him from body to soul and thence upwards to God (‘quam utique mortem ut Socrates devitaret, Diotima ipsum a corpore ad animum, ab hoc in angelum, ab eo reduxit in deum’).” See Chapter 4 for further discussion of the way Milton draws upon the philosophical mythology of Neoplatonic thought. 52

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve Let him who can, follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of his eyes and not turn back to the bodily splendours which he saw before. When he sees the beauty in bodies he must not run after them; we must know that they are images, traces, shadows, and hurry away to that which they image. For if a man runs to the image and wants to seize it as if it was the reality (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, which some story somewhere, I think, said riddlingly a man wanted to catch and sank down into the stream and disappeared) then this man who clings to beautiful bodies and will not let them go, will, like the man in the story, but in soul, not in body, sink down into the dark depths ... consorting with shadows there and here. (Enneads I.vi.8)

As a result, in Sandys’ words, Narcissus “ignorantly affecting one thing, pursues another; nor can ever satisfie his longings” (160). Eve is, of course, contrasted with Narcissus on this point: she learns to delight in likeness with difference rather than simply likeness. Eve herself draws the moral from the story as she professes to have learnt to value other qualities beyond mere physical appearance “and from that time see / How beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (IV.489–91). Since Eve is at a further remove from the divine image than Adam, “resembling less / His image who made both” (VIII.543–4), his “is the likeness in which she may best read the lineaments of deity” (Gregerson, 160) – “God in him” (IV.299). Heather James suggests that Milton has invoked the story of Narcissus not only “to prefigure the Fall” but also “because he finds redemptive possibilities in the tale” (132), while Davies draws out more fully the implications of Milton’s revision of the Ovidian myth: “Looking at Adam, [Eve] is performing the role of a higher visionary Narcissus, one who looks upward for a refined reflection of himself rather than downward into the distorting mirror of his senses” (1983, 14).54 Adam, however, seems unable to heed the angel’s warning and finds it difficult to live by the knowledge that it is “the mind / And inward Faculties, which most excell” (VIII.541–2). Like Narcissus, Adam finds life apart from his image unthinkable. His despairing reaction to her temporary removal from his side immediately after her creation proves symptomatic: Shee disappeerd, and left me dark, I wak’d To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure. (VIII.478–80)

It again adumbrates his inability to contemplate any alternative course of action other than to die with her after her fall (IX.906–10).55 54 Kerrigan argues that: “Her entrancement with her form is transferred, as it were, to Adam, lifting the figure reflected in the mirror of narcissism into the higher dialectic of mutual love,” but he also goes on to acknowledge how in Paradise Lost, “the authority of its temptation scene depends on the entanglement, in the tempted, of narcissism and mutual love” (70). 55 Adam’s decision to risk dying with Eve rather than living in Paradise without her is considered in greater depth in Chapter 6.


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IX Eve’s account of her experiences by the lake is a narrative hinge that looks not only forward to Adam’s account of his own and Eve’s creation in Book VIII, but also backward to Book II. For our reading of Milton’s use of the Narcissus myth in Book IV is further complicated because it is not the first time in the narrative that the fable is evoked; its meaning is thus at least partly generated by internal associative links as well as through its application outside of the poem.56 Eve is not the only female character to recount her first memories of life to her “author.” A network of comparisons and contrasts is articulated between Eve’s first moments of consciousness and Sin’s account of her own creation. It is a passage that merits close consideration. Sin recounts how ... on the left side op’ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright, Then shining heav’nly fair, a Goddess arm’d Out of thy head I sprung: amazement seis’d All th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoild affraid At first, and call’d me Sin, and for a Sign Portentous held me; but familiar grown, I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamour’d, and such joy thou took’st With me in secret, that my womb conceiv’d A growing burden. (II.755–67)

The similarities are obvious enough: both emerge from the left side; both reflect their author’s image and seem “heav’nly fair”; both possess winningly “attractive graces” and unite sexually with the being from whom they were created. (In fullness of time, both too will succumb to a persuasive speech by Satan and disobey God’s express command: Sin by opening the gates of Hell, Eve by eating the forbidden fruit.) The differences, however, are at least as telling. On the one hand, the impress of her own viewpoint shapes Eve’s account; from the outset she establishes her subjectivity: “That day I oft remember ...” (IV.449, emphasis added). Sin, on the other hand, is trying to jog the memory of a forgetful sire and lover. She gives her account at one remove from direct experience, supplying more information than she could conceivably be a party to. This is emphasized by the formal architecture of the verse: the way in which, in a single, unbroken verse-period, the first personal pronoun is withheld for ten lines or so until the penultimate word in the passage that follows:

56 As Knoespel has wisely observed: “The fable ... evokes more meaning than any single meaning supplied from the outside” (1989, 79).

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve ... at th’ Assembly, and in sight Of all the Seraphim with thee combin’d In bold conspiracy against Heav’n’s King, All on a sudden miserable pain Surpris’d thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swumm In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth, till on the left side op’ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count’nance bright, Then shining heav’nly fair, a Goddess arm’d Out of thy head I sprung. (II.749–58)

Eve is brought to “birth” painlessly from Adam’s side, while Satan is racked by pain at Sin’s sudden delivery. Though Eve is startled by the appearance of her reflection and “started back,” it is still a pleasant surprise; the unexpected emergence of Sin on the more public occasion of her parthenogenesis, in contrast, at first causes deep consternation and alarm among the spectators: “back they recoild affraid.” It is even strongly intimated that Satan was himself the one most appalled that his mind had forged his sinful thought into a separate reality: in time, Sin finds acceptance and, “familiar grown,” won over even “The most averse,” Satan himself, “thee chiefly.” Sin is a natural in the art of pleasing, but unlike Eve, she neither experiences individual will nor acknowledges any separate desire. She shows no initiative but exists in Echo-like responsiveness. Like Narcissus, who was, as Sandys put it, “strangly intoxicated with selfe admiration” (160), the emphasis in Sin’s account falls entirely upon the narcissistic nature of Satan’s enjoyment of her. There is no suggestion of mutuality nor is there any evidence of interest in her as a separate individual with her own desires. Like the first Woman in Genesis and in Du Bartas or Pygmalion’s ivory maid, Sin’s own feelings are not consulted, and she does not even expect them to be. Ironically, Satan, even more than Narcissus – who at least sought for some signs of reciprocity in his illusory “relationship” with another – comes to exemplify how love which focuses exclusively on the feelings of the lover is nothing other than self-love. Like Pygmalion’s infatuation with his own creation (operisque sui concepit amorem, Met. X.249), Satan demonstrates the self-absorption of the artist in love with an extension of his own thought.57 Although Pygmalion escapes the narcissistic implications of his fate through the miraculous intervention of Venus, it is no accident that Myrrha, his granddaughter, conceives an incestuous love for her own father (Met. X.298–471). The narcissistic element in their incestuously abusive relationship is even explicitly recognized by Sin. Like the ill-omened sexual relations between Myrrha and Cinyras, the true nature of the relationship between Satan and Sin is not openly acknowledged but is furtively consummated, while the product of this shameful inbreeding will, of course, be Death itself. 57 It is Satan rather than Eve who becomes paradigmatic of the hopelessly enclosed self; see Shullenberger (1993).


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It is only after the Fall that Adam similarly objectifies Eve and looks upon her simply as the means of gratifying his sexual desires: “For never did thy Beautie since the day / I saw thee first and wedded thee ... / ... so enflame my sense / With ardor to enjoy thee” (IX.1029–1032; emphasis added). Milton’s use of the myth of Narcissus in Sin’s narrative of her creation thus helps to throw light on the especial qualities of pre and postlapsarian sexuality as well as emphasizing the way in which Eve is figured not only as the image of Adam but as an autonomous individual. Paradise Lost in its larger movement is a narrative of the expected, but there are smaller currents and cross-currents of the unexpected. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos’ remark that “Eve is never pictured as anything other than rather obligingly accepting Adam’s advances” (102) conveniently skips over Eve’s own account of her initial rejection of Adam’s approaches, just as later Adam himself seems to offer a significantly edited version of their first meeting to Raphael, in which any memory of her active resistance or any possibility of a conflict of wills has been effectively suppressed. Demetrakopoulos’ comment provides an accurate image of Sin’s response to Satan, but as a summary of Eve’s more complex relationship with Adam, it is evidently an over-simplification. The chronological priority given to Eve’s account of their first encounter is significant: not only does it give narrative weight and emphasis to Eve’s own experience, but, by allowing Eve to speak first, her version of events is not made to seem merely a faint or distorted echo of Adam’s. As Eve deliberately turns from Adam back to the image of herself in the lake, Milton forces a revision in the reader’s expectations: we do not find the idyllic harmony of wills that one would have thought must monotonously define paradisal relationships. The narrative falters on the brink of crisis as Adam is manoeuvred into the position of Echo, unable to offer a powerful enough alternative to distract Narcissus from the attractions of his lovely image. Ironically, of course, Adam was not made to be an echo of Eve; on the contrary, Eve was created to be the image of Adam. The sense of dislocation, while significant in itself, is only momentary, however; Adam swiftly asserts himself and throws off the passive role of Echo that seems to have been temporarily foisted upon him, as the scene of Narcissus gazing enamoured at his own reflection almost imperceptibly transforms itself into one of Apollo’s ardent pursuit of Daphne.


Chapter 2

Daphne and the Issue of Consent It is a rare blessing when two people fall in love at exactly the same moment; even in Paradise, in the first ever love story, Adam and Eve do not instantly fall happily into each other’s arms. To find herself suddenly the object of another’s intense attention is disconcerting for Eve. The myth superimposed on Genesis thus dissolves from a static tableau of Narcissus gazing at his reflection into a scene of flight and pursuit so familiar from the first book of the Metamorphoses. Milton displays his assimilative genius here, combining and co-ordinating different types of action into an evolving narrative sequence. By yoking discrete episodes from Ovidian myth into fruitful collaboration, Milton stirs the dry bones of Genesis to strangely independent life and meaning, offering complex emotional insights into the differing trajectories of erotic desire in the first man and woman. Milton’s evocation of the Ovidian story of Daphne’s flight from Apollo has been generally overlooked. Compared with the scene by the lake, the linkage is understated, but although the most audible echoes are only fleeting, once recognized, the myth of Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne has considerable bearing on both the present situation and future developments in the narrative. Douglas Bush seems to be the only critic to have remarked upon this open allusion and he merely notes that Adam’s words, “Return faire Eve; / Whom fli’st thou? whom thou fli’st, of him thou art” (IV.481–2) serve to “echo those of the amorous Apollo to the fleeing Daphne” in order to support his argument that Milton is hinting at Adam’s vulnerability here by suggesting the “germ of his excessive devotion to Eve.” There is, however, ample correspondence, both in general structure and in detailed verbal patterning, to suggest deliberate allusion on Milton’s part; but first it is worth briefly reviewing the significance of this myth both to Ovid and Milton. Three such examples follow in rapid succession: the lengthy account of Daphne’s flight from Apollo (Met. I. 490–520); the more cursory accounts of Io’s unsuccessful attempt to outstrip Jupiter (Met. I. 588–600), and Syrinx’ transformation into marsh reeds to elude her pursuer, Pan (Met. I. 698–712). In this last example, Ovid wittily draws attention to the similarities in basic outline between each of these three stories: he must step in and rehearse the familiar features of the story – flight, pursuit, metamorphosis – after Mercury’s immediate audience Argus nods off after the preamble to the all-too-familiar tale. Anderson maintains that this highly crafted episode is “essentially Ovid’s free invention,” though earlier versions were in existence, they differed substantially “in detail, theme and tone, from the account” produced here by Ovid. See Parthenius 15 for further details. In more general terms, Davies has likened “Adam’s chase after Eve” to “a burlesque of Apollo’s hunt for Daphne” (1983, 13).

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I The story of Apollo’s love for Daphne is of paramount importance to the Metamorphoses as a whole. The narrator draws attention to it as primus amor, the “first love” (Met. I.452) not only of Phoebus Apollo, but the first of many love stories featured in the poem. It is a crucial moment in Ovid’s poem, the site of a generic dispute and resolution: for it is here Ovid, with typically sly obliquity, sets out his own epic intent. The story begins with Apollo, exulting over his prowess with the bow, dismissing the boy-god Cupid’s claim to such martial weapons as more becoming his own manly shoulders. Arma (weapons), the first word of Virgil’s great epic poem, the Aeneid, like bella (wars), had become a byword for epic in programmatic discussions of generic expectations. The dispute over appropriate arma thus encourages the reader to regard the episode as a matter of generic classification, and draws attention to its significance as a site of potential generic conflict. Ovid himself had opened his collection of love elegies, the Amores, with an account of his grand plan to write about Arma gravi numero violentaque bella (“arms, and the violent deeds of war in weighty verse,” I.i.1), when Cupid himself had stepped in and foiled his epic aspirations. The poet had then learnt by personal experience the accuracy of the young deity’s aim. As he takes possession of the poet’s heart, Love deflects him from his epic purpose and ensures that he has material befitting elegiac verse: In Augustan literature, the name of the sun god Phoebus (“the bright”) became increasingly identified with Apollo, traditional wielder of the bow who, with his other attribute, the lyre, was god of poetry. A striking example of the effective manipulation of this identification occurs in the description of the locus amoenus where Proserpina is snatched by Dis (Met. V.388–9), see Chapter 5. It is also typical of Ovid that in this poem, apparently designed to win Augustus’ favour, he could not resist subverting the achievement of empire, privileging amor over arma. For arma in such contexts see, for example, Propertius, I.vii.2, II.i.18; for bella, Propertius, II.x.8, IV.vi.69; Horace, Ars Poetica, 73. The first two couplets in full read thus: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam edere, materia conveniente modis. par erat inferior versus – risisse Cupido dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. (Amores I.i.1–4) Arms, and the violent deeds of war, I was all ready to declaim, in weighty verse with matter suited to the measure. The second line was equal to the first – but, it’s said, Cupid, with a laugh, stole away with one foot. The anecdote is more pointed in the Latin original because the elegiac couplet, the metre of Latin love elegy, comprised one line of hexameter followed by a shorter pentameter. The hexameter had established itself at an early date as the verse form of epic, so Ovid’s opening line is indeed composed in the metre appropriate for heroic epic, while the shorter second line demotes its pretensions, subsuming it into an elegiac couplet.

Daphne and the Issue of Consent

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Me miserum! certas habuit puer ille sagittas. uror, et in vacuo pectore regnat Amor. (Amores I.i.25–6) “Ah, poor me! Sure of their aim were the arrows that boy had. I am on fire, and Love reigns in my heart just now so fancy free.”

In the Metamorphoses, it is Apollo, the god of poetry himself, who likewise learns to his cost the accuracy of Cupid’s aim, and is forced to acknowledge his heart’s subjection to love’s sway in lines that audibly echo the poet’s own declaration above: certa quidem nostra est, nostra tamen una sagitta certior, in vacuo quae vulnera pectore fecit. (Met. I.519–20) “Sure of its aim is my arrow, but there is one arrow, surer than my own, which has wounded my heart just now so fancy free.”

However, Apollo’s admission of defeat makes insufficient amends to the implacable god of love who has already devised a further refinement to Apollo’s punishment: eque sagittifera prompsit duo tela pharetra diversorum operum: fugat hoc, facit illud amorem; quod facit, auratum est et cuspide fulget acuta, quod fugat, obtusum est et habet sub harundine plumbum. (Met. I.468–71) He drew from his quiver two arrows of opposite effect: one puts love to flight, the other kindles it. The one which kindles love is gold and gleams with a sharp point; the other which puts love to flight is blunt and tipped with lead.

Although Cupid has transfixed Apollo with the golden arrow that inspires love, the object of his desire, Daphne, has been pierced by the leaden arrow that repels love: Apollo and Daphne are thus both fated to be locked in an intractable erotic agon. The clash between Apollo and Cupid has evidently an important metapoetic dimension: Apollo’s claim, and Cupid’s counter-claim, to superiority enact

Barnard has made some interesting observations on this very point:

In portraying Apollo as both a warrior-god, the killer of Python, and a lover, Ovid draws

from two well-known contrasting conventions, one that regards the god as the patron of epic poetry and the other that makes Apollo the “enemy” of epic, the god of the lyre who cautions Callimachus to “keep the Muse slender” (Aetia, 1.1.25) and drives Propertius away from “heroic song” (3.3.13–26). We cannot but think that Ovid is playfully and maliciously “chastising” Apollo for his advice to Callimachus and Propertius against writing epic verses; he deflates the epic Apollo and makes him the protagonist in that “slender” poetry the god himself advocates. (5) Indeed, when Daphne takes refuge from Apollo in her new form, she literally shuts Apollo out. He becomes a type of exclusus amator denied access by a dura puella, a situation all too familiar to the reader of elegiac poetry.


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here in miniature a tension that informs Ovid’s whole epic enterprise in the Metamorphoses. The poem’s generic self-consciousness is expressed not just in the observance, but also in the creative transgression, of the expected bounds of heroic epic. In the first book of the Metamorphoses, the winged boy not only proves his entitlement to the arms of heroic epic, but also demonstrates his universal mastery by subjecting Apollo, and other gods in turn, to his power. The outcome of the confrontation between Cupid and Apollo thus dramatizes the irruption of erotic and elegiac themes into heroic epic. By recalling and inverting the programmatic opening to the Amores, Ovid establishes the distinctive character of his own unique brand of epic in which love and desire will feature as irresistible driving forces in so many of the diverse tales. Some sixteen hundred years later, Milton likewise self-consciously distanced himself from the typical preoccupations of martial epic, declaring himself: “Not sedulous by Nature to indite / Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem’d” (IX.27–9). The relationship of Adam and Eve is central to Milton’s epic design in a way that seems unmatched by the love interest of classical or Renaissance epics. So it seems not without significance that the panegyric to “wedded Love” (IV.750– 62), which crowns the love story of the first human couple, openly invokes the divine machinery so familiar from Ovid. Ovid’s tale of Apollo, brought low by love, as well as being a story of wouldbe rape, frustrated passion and the disarming reach of desire, also carries a subterranean import – of the irrelevance of warlike feats. Apollo promises the transformed Daphne: “at, quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, arbor eris certe” dixit “mea semper habebunt te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae. tu ducibus Latiis aderis, cum laeta Triumphum vox canet et visent longas Capitolia pompas. (Met. I.557–61) “But since you cannot be my bride, you will at least be my tree! My hair, my lyre and my quiver will always be wreathed with you, laurel. You will be present with the Roman generals when joyful voices raise their song of victory and the Capital watches the long processions.”

Virgil, Ovid’s great predecessor in the epic tradition, had of course availed himself of the same divine machinery when introducing into his grand epic of arma virumque the tragic love-affair of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid I and IV. Venus and Cupid’s intervention at Carthage is, in turn, directly modelled on an episode from the Argonautica of Apollonius in which Aphrodite persuades her son to shoot an arrow at Medea so that she will fall in love with Jason (III.83ff). The Argonautica was the only epic before Virgil’s Aeneid that could be compared with Homer’s in subject and extent, and the first epic to give a prominent place to love – Medea’s for Jason. Cupid’s arrows may have seemed to Virgil to be more in keeping with the world of love elegy than epic, for he skilfully varies this traditional mechanism for triggering the onset of love by Venus’ stratagem to have Cupid impersonate Aeneas’ son Ascanius and thereby infiltrate the heart of the childless, young widow with a deep and passionate love.


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With typical ingenuity, Ovid obliquely implies that the pomp of martial Rome is a second-best to love, a kind of consolation prize. Milton likewise situates the crux of his poem not in the martial strife between Satan and God, but in the complexly human dynamics of love between Adam and Eve – amor, not arma, is Milton’s theme. This is not Ovidian love by any means. Milton, appropriating and transforming the theme in the process, redeploys the emblematic significance of Love’s attributes to establish the unique quality of married love in Eden: Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings,10 Reigns here and revels. (IV.763–5)

The anaphora of “here” in the first line of the extract reinforces the distinctiveness of married love in an unfallen world, drawing attention to the mutuality and constancy of feeling enjoyed by the first married couple, while the variation in the third line throws the emphasis onto Love’s dominion and delight. It is worth noting in passing the exceptional nature of this passage: although the winged god makes only a brief appearance, the direct treatment of a mythical figure, when elsewhere mythological material is so carefully relegated to the formally inferior position of illustrative example, seems significant in itself, and gives a distinctly Ovidian flavour to the passage.11

Fowler helpfully notes, “Love is probably given purple wings on the authority of Rem. amor. 701, where he has purpureas ... alas,” and proceeds to argue that: “Ovid’s purpureas ... meant ‘shining’; whereas many of M.’s early readers would have taken the hint of Reigns (l. 765) and assumed that purple as an emblem of sovereignty was intended” by Milton here. 11 Despite Sylvester’s earnest prayer to win “our wanton ILE / From Ovid’s heires, and their un-hallowed spell / Here charming senses, chaining soules in Hell” (Du Bartas, II.i. 1.41–3), the narrative is peopled with Ovidian deities who take a part, albeit decorative, in the action as God’s helpers in the garden. God chooses for Adam “a happy Seat”: Which dainty Flora paveth sumptuously With flowry VER’S inameld tapistry; Pomona pranks with fruits, whose taste excels, And Zephyr fils with Musk and Amber smels; Where God himselfe (as Gardner) treads the allies. (Du Bartas, II.i.1.76; 78–82) This passage demonstrates by contrast Milton’s own controlled use of mythological material, which is always subordinated to his overriding themes. At the same time, it perhaps illustrates another reason why Milton generally avoided a direct treatment of mythical figures: these lines seem inadvertently to diminish the majesty of God, putting him on a level with minor rural deities. 10

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II Returning to the early stages of Adam and Eve’s relationship, let us revisit the passage in which Milton fashions Adam’s account of Eve’s creation and her sudden disappearance. In Genesis we are merely told: And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. (Gen. II.21–2)

Milton adds soft and subtle shading to give psychological depth and emotional colour to the bare outline of Genesis. He achieves this, as we have seen, by drawing out the implications and possibilities inherent in the passage, seizing upon the suggestion of a brief separation in the wording of the final line, “and brought her to the man.” His prime creative innovation is to have Adam, “Though sleeping” (VIII.463), entirely conscious of what is happening. Adam himself explains how, although his eyes were closed, “the Cell / Of Fancie [his] internal sight” (VIII.460– 461) was left open so that he was able to witness the creative process, observing as a spectator the extraction of the rib from his own recumbent body and the way Eve took shape under her Maker’s fashioning hands: Abstract as in a transe methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping op’nd my left side, and took From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme And Life-blood streaming fresh; wide was the wound, But suddenly with flesh fill’d up and heal’d: The Rib he formd and fashond with his own hands; Under his forming hands a Creature grew, Manlike but different Sex, so lovly faire, That what seemd fair in all the World, seemed now Mean, or in her summd up, in her containd And in her looks, which from that time infus’d Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before. (VIII.462–75)

The passage is now seen to be the conductor of a more powerful emotional charge since Adam is made acutely aware of Eve’s sudden removal. Adam suffers the apparent frustration of all his hopes: Shee disappeerd, and left me dark, I wak’d To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure. (VIII.478–80)

The keen sense of bitter disappointment is effectively conveyed through the suggestive imagery of light and darkness. When Adam is left dark, it does not


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seem to be the sun’s “faire Light” (VIII.273) that is eclipsed, rather the source of light seems to have originated in Eve herself and is extinguished with her sudden disappearance. There is considerable ironic force here when we recall that Adam has already been associated by Milton with the young sun god in Eve’s account of his pursuit of her. The conceit in which the sun is relegated to the subsidiary role of reflecting light, in turn illuminates the relationship of female and male in Paradise Lost. Initially, Raphael confirms that the moon is dependent on the sun as the source of her light: First in the East his glorious Lamp was seen, Regent of Day ... / ... less bright the Moon, But opposite in leveld West was set His mirror, with full face borrowing her Light From him. (VII.370–371; 375–8)

As Watkins points out, the idea “that the female moon’s paler light is a mere reflection of the sun’s fits neatly Milton’s belief in the subordination of woman to man” (note 9, 60): as the attendant moon (VIII.149) is a reflection and satellite of the sun, so Eve is the image and dependant of Adam. However, Raphael later casts this hierarchy into doubt when he describes how the sun and moon communicate “Male and Femal Light, / Which two great Sexes animate the World” (VIII.150– 51). These lines, as Don Parry Norford maintains, “do seem to suggest that female light, as one of the two great sexes, is self-luminous, which apparently contradicts the idea of the moon as simply a mirror” (1975, 25). The relationship between male and female has now become one of mutuality, of giving and receiving, with “Communicating” (VIII.150) suggesting the fruitful intercourse of equally active partners. In the earthly sphere a more precarious equilibrium is preserved between male and female forces. Eve’s radiant beauty tends to throw into confusion the primary hierarchy and casts doubts about the respective positions of Adam and Eve in the chain of being.12 Let us look more closely at the implications of Milton’s alignment of Adam with Apollo. As is so often the case, allusion seems used here for the purposes of both similarity and contrast, with the interplay between similarity and contrast being of at least equal significance. At first the association casts Adam in a flattering light: Apollo embodies an ideal of youthful but mature male beauty and moral excellence. Mary Barnard helpfully summarizes the god’s attributes: he was generally held to stand for “order, dignity and moderation,” while the “predominant qualities” of Apolline religious observances were “seriousness and solemnity” (9). However, under the influence of unrequited love, Apollo suffers a surprising psychological transformation: the god is forced to shed his accustomed attributes by assuming the role of frustrated lover. Passion overrides reason and common sense; desire instils false hope so that the god of prophecy is ironically deceived by his own 12

The implications of this observation will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.


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oracles (Met. I.491); paradoxically too, the god of medicine cannot cure his own wounded heart or love sickness (Met. I.521–4). Eventually, the distorting effects of desire are fully unmasked: when Apollo’s soft, coaxing words fail to make an impression on the unyielding Daphne (Met. I.530–531), the rejected suitor unreasonably refuses to accept the meaning of her flight and take no for an answer. Apollo immediately prepares to force himself upon his unwilling victim. Hounding his defenceless prey like a bloodthirsty hunting dog (Met. I.533–9), Apollo is explicitly likened to the kind of savage, predatory animal that he had earlier expressly denied that he resembled, thereby revealing his sexual aggression and undermining the sincerity of his earlier pose of concern for the fleeing nymph (Met. I.505–11). Ovid’s third-person narrative does not identify with Apollo’s feelings but invites the reader to judge his words and actions from a distance, thus avoiding a too credulous sympathy for the selfpitying lover. Ovid thus deftly suggests the self-interest that lurks beneath the flattering formulae of courtship. It might be readily argued that if there is a resemblance between Apollo and Adam at this juncture, then it is the points of contrast that are of more significance here. The narrator has taken pains to assure the reader that only Love’s golden arrows of mutual desire are to be found in Paradise. While Daphne may be Apollo’s first love, she is only one of many – Apollo, as Anderson wryly observes, was “no more ‘monogamous’ than the other gods” (note to Met. I.452–3) – Eve remains Adam’s one and only love. Nevertheless, intriguing points of contact do emerge. Adam is clearly troubled about the effect Eve has had upon him and confides this sense of uneasiness to Raphael. With the exception of his passionate feelings for her, he remains: “in all enjoyments else / Superior and unmov’d,” but in Eve’s presence he finds himself, “here onely weake / Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance.” Adam instinctively attributes this disconcerting sense of vulnerability to an inherent flaw in his own make-up, and speculates how: “Nature fail’d in mee, and left some part / Not proof enough such Object to sustain” (VIII.531–5). Raphael firmly absolves Nature, and thus God, of any responsibility for creating him with any imperfection or design fault, but his confident assurances that, “Nature ... hath don her part” (VIII.561), do not entirely reassure Adam or the reader, especially when considered in conjunction with the difficulties that issue from Eve’s instinctive response to Adam: hers is evidently not an experience of love at first sight. III The natural corollary of linking Apollo with Adam is of course a pairing together of Eve and Daphne,13 especially since Adam is never given a mythological role 13

Rees has located another link between Daphne and Eve at IV.272. Although she does not consider the lines particularly at issue in this discussion (IV.481–2), she claims that there is “an oblique reminder” of Daphne’s fate in “the reference to ‘that sweet Grove / Of Daphne


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independently of Eve. The Ovidian association is strongly implicit as Eve describes how she turned her back on Adam and fled back towards the lake, while he gave chase, shouting after her: Thou following cryd’st aloud, Return faire Eve; Whom fli’st thou? Whom thou fli’st, of him thou art. (IV.481–2)

The stage directions embedded here make it plain that Adam is not simply standing still, calling out after Eve, but is pursuing her as she runs away from him. The scene is evidently one of pursuit and potential rape, so graphically portrayed in the Metamorphoses. Moreover, Adam’s urgent plea with its emphatic reiteration of “fli’st” audibly echoes the stressed repetition of fugire in Apollo’s desperate appeal to Daphne not to flee from him: nescis, temeraria, nescis, / quem fugias, ideoque fugis (“You do not know, heedless girl, you do not know who it is you fly and that’s why you fly from me,” Met. I.514–15).14 In his commentary on this speech in which Apollo tries to persuade Daphne not to flee from him (hac oratione Apollo conatur Daphnem persuadere ne se fugiat), Regius singles out for special mention elegans repetitio amatoriae orationi maxime conueniens (“the fine use of repetition especially suitable for the discourse of love”). Adam also follows Apollo’s line of reasoning in his efforts to persuade Eve not to fly from him. Apollo assumes that Daphne shuns him because she does not know who he is: the stressed repetition of fugire is noteworthy, but so too is the insistent reiteration of nescis which may have suggested to Milton a thematic motif peculiar to Narcissus, Daphne and Eve – their lack of essential knowledge. In the case of Narcissus and Eve, both are unaware at first of the identity of the figure each seeks in the pool. As Eve becomes associated with Daphne, this dynamic is reversed, since both are initially ignorant of the identity of the pursuer, while both pursuers have the advantage of knowing whom it is they pursue. The open allusion to Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne prompts speculation into a more complex series of correspondences between Daphne and Eve herself. Like Daphne, Eve herself is not “uninformd / Of nuptial Sanctitie and marriage Rites” (VIII.486–7), but also, like Daphne, she turns her back on all this implies, nec, quid Hymen, quid Amor, quid sint conubia, curat (“and she cares for nothing to do with what Hymen, Love or marriage might involve,” Met. I.480). It is as if Eve too had been struck by Love’s leaden arrow for, on encountering Adam, she too flies the very name of love. Adam gives chase and hotly pursues her with pleading words, while, like Daphne, fugit ocior aura / illa levi neque ad haec revocantis verba by Orontes’ ” which, she maintains, “has the same evocative overtones as the reference, immediately preceding it, to the field in which Proserpine gathered flowers” (252). 14 Knoespel, in contrast, believes that Adam invokes Narcissus’ pleading words to his image, as it threatens to fly from him, when his reflection becomes effaced, after the surface of the water becomes disturbed by his own falling tears (Met. III.476–9) (1989, 89). However, Adam’s words more closely resemble Apollo’s, and it is obvious that Adam, like Apollo, is not content to feed his love by simply gazing on the beauty before him.

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resistit (“she flies from him swifter than the fleeting breeze, and does not stop when he calls her back,” Met. I.502–3). As we have seen, the first lines of Adam’s speech clearly indicate that Eve is in full flight and not inclined to risk stopping to make a reply. In spite of Regius’ words of commendation, it is rarely the case that such rhetoric successfully influences its immediately intended audience in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Since the youthful and impetuous gods of Ovidian myth are not renowned for their patience – they never woo with gentle persuasive speech for long (sed enim non sustinet ultra / perdere blanditias iuvenis deus, Met. I.530– 531) – the brutal image of a hunting dog fastening upon its hapless prey instantly follows to suggest the imminent rape of the fearful Daphne by Apollo: ut canis in vacuo leporem cum Gallicus arvo vidit, et hic praedam pedibus petit, ille salutem (alter inhaesuro similis iam iamque tenere sperat et extento stringit vestigia rostro; alter in ambiguo est, an sit conprensus, et ipsis morsibus eripitur tangentiaque ora relinquit): sic deus et virgo; hic spe celer, illa timore. (Met. I.533–9) As when a Hare the speedy Gray-hound spyes; His feet for prey, shee hers for safety plyes; Now bears he up; now, now he hopes to fetch her; And, with his snowt extended straines to catch her: Not knowing whether caught or no, shee slips Out of his wide-stretcht jawes, and touching lips. The God and Virgin in such strife appeare: He, quickned by his hope; She, by her feare. (Sandys)

But what of Adam and Eve? When words prove insufficient, impatient of delay and overcome by ardent passion, is Adam prepared to rape Eve? Surely not. And yet, if we look carefully at Eve’s closing words, “with that thy gentle hand / Seisd mine, I yielded” (IV.488–9), which discreetly draw a veil over the scene, such a question may not seem quite so outrageous or fanciful, and becomes another intriguing example of the way that the poem gestures towards repressed alternatives. Eve’s words are obviously influenced by her present happiness, but even so the mild epithet “gentle,” which suggests that Adam was prepared to use conciliatory measures, is placed in a position of almost unbearable tension with the aggressive verb “seisd” which is held back to open the next line and so gives the reader a jolt of surprise. It seems to imply that Adam was unwilling to tolerate any further delay. The scene of love-making after the Fall acts as an oblique commentary on these lines. Indeed, Adam himself suggests the comparison when he confesses to Eve: “never did thy Beautie since the day / I saw thee first ... / ... so enflame my sense / With ardor to enjoy thee” (IX. 1029–32). With that “Her hand he seis’d” (IX.1037), but Eve is now as eager for sex as he is. Critics have drawn attention to the dramatic shock of encountering Adam’s vocabulary here, particularly the expressions “play,” “enjoy thee” “seis’d,” after the reverence hitherto shown in his addresses to Eve. But while the impact of these lines from later in the poem is


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evidently stronger, the effect is surely similar. This interpretation seems justified in part by the unelaborated choice of verb, “yielded,” to denote Eve’s compliance.15 This seems to have been deliberately left ambiguous and calls for careful reading: either Eve willingly complied with Adam’s demands, after coming to recognize the justice of his claim upon her and having been swayed by his “pleaded reason” (VIII.510), as Adam himself suggests in the account he gives to Raphael; or it may imply that Eve pragmatically gave way to a stronger physical force. Like Daphne, the virgin gardener Pomona, Veneris quoque nulla cupido est (“likewise had no desire for love,” Met. XIV.634) and had no desire to marry, but when Vertumnus, tiring of persuasion, decided to resort to force, she fortunately mutua vulnera sensit (“felt the mutual wound”) just in time, and Ovid delicately withdraws from the scene (Met. XIV.770–71).16 Eve’s account of Adam’s courtship thus poses something of a dilemma for the reader at this point: does it show her willing acceptance of Adam’s suit, or his forceful re-possession of her?17 Our sense of difficulty is heightened by the way in which the actual moment of decision is elided over by Eve’s evasive form of words. Was Eve under duress, following the line of least resistance when she “yielded” to Adam, or was she too finally pierced by Love’s golden arrow (Met I.470) as Milton elsewhere implies (IV.763)? IV It is often argued that the point of Eve’s hesitation over whether to reject or accept Adam’s suit is to demonstrate her freedom of choice and to highlight her voluntary and deliberate commitment to heterosexual love in marriage. However, even the erotically charged description that immediately follows Eve’s account of her first meeting with Adam and his wooing of her, a passage which is surely designed to enact their present mutual happiness, transmits a curiously mixed signal from Eve who ... with eyes Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d, And meek surrender, half imbracing leand On our first Father, half her swelling Breast Naked met his. (IV.492–6)

It cannot be denied that the immediate and enduring impression created is that of an innocently sensuous and actively desirous Eve, but at the same time it becomes evident that she holds back in a way that conveys a certain reluctance on her part. 15

For a different emphasis, see McChrystal, who argues, “before the Fall, Eve’s ‘I’ affirms her undeniable self-presence, demonstrating her integrity, control, agency, and even a kind of gracious power as she declares, ‘I yielded’ ” (498). 16 See Chapter 6 for a more detailed analysis of Milton’s use of the Ovidian tale of Pomona and Vertumnus. 17 Halley has posed a similar question (248).

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Shari Zimmerman has noted this “seed of resistance,” triggered by the repetition of “half”: though Eve leans against Adam, she nevertheless “maintains a degree of distance in a ‘half embrace,’ and allows only ‘half her swelling Breast’ to meet his” (252). Many years ago Cleanth Brooks remarked that Eve’s speech in Book IV seemed to anticipate Freud’s observations on the comparative difficulty girls may experience in the transition to adult heterosexuality (176), and it is not surprising to find that Freudian psychologists too have interpreted Daphne’s flight as “symbolizing a girl’s instinctive horror of the sex act” (Graves, I.17). C. S. Lewis encouraged the reader to imagine Eve “blushing like the Morn” when Adam first led her “To the Nuptial Bowre” (VIII.510–511) because of her “self-consciousness” at being so highly valued, but another, less complacent, construction could surely be placed upon her blushes. 18 It seems at least worth noting how Daphne, who sought to enjoy perpetua virginitas (Met. I.486–7) responded when “nuptial Sanctitie and marriage Rites” (VIII.487) were mentioned in her presence. Daphne’s response was extreme, of course, loathing the idea of marriage as if it were a thing of evil, “her pretty face blushed red with shame” (pulchra verecundo subfuderat ora rubore, Met. I.484). Moreover, it also seems suggestive that when Ovid recounts how the virgin goddess Diana was surprised bathing by the young hunter Actaeon, he relates the incident as a violation of her scrupulous chastity; he describes her embarrassment at being caught without her clothes and the effect upon her outraged modesty with these words: qui color infectis adversi solis ab ictu nubibus esse solet aut purpureae Aurorae, is fuit in vultu visae sine veste Dianae (Met. III.183–5) Such as that colour, which the Clowds adorns, Shot by the Sunne-beam’s; or the rosie Morn’s: Such flusht in Dians cheeks, being naked tane. (Sandys)

This is not an isolated difficulty. A similar, unresolved tension underlies our first introduction to Adam and Eve. A number of critics have commented on the way in which the description of Eve’s hair (IV.304–11) becomes suggestive – at least on one level of interpretation – of their sexual relationship.19 Indeed on the strength of this passage, Lieb has gone so far as to conclude that in Milton’s eyes: “Eve must be sexually dominated by a superior force and thus yield herself as the hair would yield itself to higher rule” (72). Both Eve and Daphne wear their hair “unadorned” / inornatos (IV.305; Met. I.497), but whereas Daphne’s hair becomes emblematic of her freedom from masculine control, growing sine lege (lit.“without law,” Met. I.477), the “Dissheveld” (IV.306) state of Eve’s tresses 18 Even Lewis has some reservations, however; see his chapter on “Unfallen Sexuality,” 122–4. 19 See, for example, Lieb (71–2) and Halkett (104).


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... impli’d Subjection, but requir’d with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best receivd, Yielded with coy submission, modest pride, And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (IV.307–11)

The use of “imply” seems of particular significance here: while Adam’s body offers its meaning openly and unequivocally (“His fair large Front and Eye sublime declar’d / Absolute rule,” IV.300–301), the text offered by Eve’s body requires an attentive reading to unfold its significance. The style of the passage embodies this difficulty in the way its shifting syntax resists final interpretation. The passage is unusually rich in oxymora: adjective and noun strike against one another with an immediacy and force that jar both components out of their accustomed meaning. So Eve, as Todd H. Sammons points out, is “not just coy (‘holding back’) nor just submissive (‘giving in’) but coyly submissive – and modestly proud and reluctantly amorous as well” (119). The final line is particularly challenging with its exquisitely fluid and complex oxymoron, “sweet reluctant amorous delay,” that occupies almost the entire verse. Kerrigan and Braden have commended the way the combination of modifying adjectives here charge “the word ‘delay’ with considerable libidinal power. Reluctant to be amorous? Reluctant to delay? In either case it is sweet” (42). In his careful and painstaking analysis, Sammons goes further, demonstrating how the line is additionally complicated by there being in fact “four pairs of yoked antitheses” at work here: “sweet / delay, sweet / reluctant, reluctant / amorous, amorous / delay. Not content with the suggestiveness of normal (two-word) oxymoron,” Milton has created “a four-word oxymoron, in the process quadrupling the number of antitheses (from one pair to four pairs),” (note 10, 125). B. A. Wright seems to have been one of the first to note that this line is a “close translation” of the second line of a couplet from the Ars Amatoria, in which Ovid, in his role as praeceptor amoris, extols the benefits of prolonged foreplay as a reliable method of achieving simultaneous orgasm: Crede mihi, non est veneris properanda voluptas, Sed sensim tarda prolicienda mora. (Ars Am. II.717–18) Believe me, love’s pleasure must not be hurried, but gradually drawn out by slow delay.

While Wright maintained that “this quotation from Ovid is meant to show unmistakably [Milton’s] view that physical love is an essential and inseparable part of human love at its best” (341), other readers have found Milton’s line more troubling. Their unease seems to stem directly from Milton’s use of “reluctant,” which, it is interesting to note, has no equivalent in the Ovidian original.20 Patrick Hume was the first editor to direct the reader’s attention to the derivation Ovid’s prolicienda comes from prolicere to allure forth, draw out, hence prolong.

20


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of the word, “Reluctant, of Reluctans, Lat. struggling, of Reluctari, Lat. to strive” (note to IV.310), but made no further comment. More recently, Edward Le Comte made explicit what Hume’s note left implicit: “Milton’s ‘reluctant’ has the etymological indication of a certain amount of struggling, reinforcing the gradualness of ‘Yielded with coy submission’ ” (91).21 As so often in the poem, the etymological force of a word may be felt to contribute to a passage’s possible significance.22 Here the literal Latin meaning of reluctari taken together with other faint warning notes heard elsewhere may bring an otherwise submerged and illdefined feeling of uneasiness nearer the surface. V This impression is further reinforced by powerful intratextual parallelism. Such a scene of flight and pursuit, as Eve describes, is familiar not only from the Metamorphoses, but also from Sin’s account of her earlier encounter with Death. The first-person narrative invites the reader to sympathize with the female victim of rape who remains the emotional focus of the tale as Sin herself gives a harrowing account of her ordeal at the hands of her own son Death: ... I fled, and cry’d out Death; Hell trembl’d at the hideous Name, and sigh’d From all her Caves, and back resounded Death. I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems, Inflam’d with lust then rage) and swifter far, Mee overtook his mother all dismaid, And in embraces forcible and foule Ingendring with me, of that rape begot These yelling monsters ... (II.787–95)

The rape sequence in Book II conveys in full and graphic detail the emotional and physical violence to which Sin is subjected. The nightmarish sense of helpless isolation is powerfully reinforced by the echoing return of her cry “Death,” reverberating through the silent emptiness of hell.23 Sin’s shocked outrage at the 21

For a different reading, see Rudat (1987, 62–5). Robert Adams helpfully describes how Milton’s deployment of such Latinate words is like “an overlay; one sees and responds to the English word at the same time that one is aware of a Latin word behind the English with its own impact and impetus” (191). See too, Ricks (63). 23 Such patterned repetition is, as Martz has noted, “a characteristic device of Ovidian rhetoric” (216). Martz makes an implicit connection with the close of the story of Narcissus, where the emphatic placing of eheu at the end of adjacent lines alerts the reader to the way Echo returns his cries of grief: quotiensque puer miserabilis “eheu”/ dixerat, haec resonis iterabat vocibus “eheu” (as often as the poor boy cried “Alas!” with answering voice she said again “Alas!” Met. III.495–6). 22


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assault is created by the revealing word order in line 792 which throws emphasis both on “Mee,” which heads the line, and “his mother,” thereby underscoring the perversion of proper family relationships.24 Though certainly no chaste virgin, the expression “all dismaid” punningly signifies Sin’s experience of violation, an impression reinforced in the line that follows when she refers to Death’s “embraces” as “forcible and foule,” the alliterative coupling suggesting both her impotent resistance and her feelings of disgust at such defilement. Recent criticism has recognized the way in which the Ovidian narrator regularly turns attention to the disorientating sense of horror, confusion, humiliation and grief suffered by the victims of such assaults.25 Recovering herself sufficiently to speak out against Tereus, the grief-stricken Philomela passionately upbraids her brother-in-law for his actions that have confounded all natural family ties (Met. VI.537–8). After Tereus has silenced her by savagely ripping out her tongue, Philomela must resort to weaving a message to her sister so that Procne may read and understand: fortunae ... suae carmen miserabile (“the pitiable tale of her misfortune,” Met. VI.582). The darkly disturbing tale of Philomela’s sufferings perfectly illustrates Kathryn Gravdal’s contention that “Ovid highlights the cruelty of sexual violation, showing the part of violence and degradation as clearly as the erotic element”; indeed, it also exemplifies her conclusion that: “Rape is not mystified or romanticized, but presented as a malevolent and criminal action.”26 It is hard to gauge the effect that Milton intends Sin’s plight to have upon the reader here; certainly, in the circumstances, it does seem curious that any sympathy at all should be generated for a personification of sin. Once again the reader seems to be encouraged to speculate upon the significance to be attributed to the network of pointed similarities and differences that emerge between Sin and Eve’s respective accounts of their earliest memories. Just as Eve’s subjectivity and freedom were defined more sharply against Sin’s passive compliance with Satan’s sexual desires, so in her second sexual encounter Sin seems to play out the tensions discernible in Eve’s first encounter with Adam in a grotesquely exaggerated and more extreme form where female freedom of choice has been entirely eroded by male compulsion. By revisiting Sin’s experiences at this point the reader is 24 The family is already hopelessly dysfunctional, of course: when recounting the story of her rape to Satan, her own father and former lover, Sin does not seem especially troubled that her rapist is the product of their own incestuous relationship in Heaven. 25 DuRocher, for instance, has alerted the reader to Ovid’s innovative practice of “alternation” whereby the narrator “moves gradually, sometimes almost imperceptibly, from the mind of one character to that of another” (178–9). DuRocher illustrates this narrative technique by demonstrating the way Ovid begins by taking “the reader close to Tereus’s initial response to the beautiful Philomela” (179), but later “assumes a position close to the thoughts of Philomela” herself (181). 26 Gravdal (158, note 9). Milton also reveals an interesting psychological insight into the complex motivations of the rapist when he implies that the perpetrator of the rape may not simply be fired by desire: according to Sin, Death seems to have been impelled by “rage” as well as voracious sexual appetite.


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reassured of the contrasting outcome of Eve’s experience whilst leaving certain unresolved tensions between the human couple that will re-emerge later.27 VI Adam’s own recollection and reading of the crucial sequence of events leading from Eve’s creation to their eventual union (VIII.460–520) creates a significantly different impression from Eve’s earlier account. The events as they unfold are again regarded from the partial perspective of an individual who necessarily only enjoys a limited insight into the total picture. However, there is a noteworthy difference in the nature of the audience in each case. Eve’s auditor was Adam himself, the other main participant in the action; his silence therefore becomes tantamount to verification of her version of events. Adam, in contrast, recounts his experiences to Raphael who, it is expressly stated, was not present to witness what happened (VIII.229), and who, therefore, is not in a position to question Adam’s account. It becomes evident that while Adam does indeed tell the truth, he does not perhaps tell the whole truth: key moments seem to be significantly abridged or have a different meaning imposed upon them. Adam’s uncontested version of what occurred between himself and Eve becomes a fascinating example of the power of a narrator to shape and control meaning by the way events are represented. After her sudden disappearance, Adam recalls his feelings of relief as Eve approached him, “Led by her Heav’nly Maker” (VIII.485); his dream has become reality. But as other needs and desires beside her own impinge upon her, for Eve must have come the realization that she is not the only subject. As she becomes the object of Adam’s appraising gaze, she discovers that she does not exist for herself alone but as a “gift” for Adam (VIII.493–4) who attempts to fix her significance thus: ... Woman is her Name, of Man Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere; And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule. (VIII.496–9)

It is at this point that Eve is seen to withdraw: She heard me thus, and though divinely brought, Yet Innocence and Virgin Modestie, Her vertue and the conscience of her worth, That would be woo’d, and not unsought be won, Not obvious, not obtrusive, but retir’d, The more desirable. (VIII.500–505)

As the pattern of emphasis and choice of conjunction in these lines subtly reveal: “and though divinely brought, / Yet ... ,” Adam is clearly uncomfortable about his 27

See Chapter 6 for further discussion of this point.


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recollection of Eve’s initial reluctance, and he makes several attempts to reach a satisfactory explanation. He tellingly suppresses any mention of her preference, albeit temporary, for her reflected image in the lake and attributes her disinclination to certain decorous and maidenly reservations appropriate to a pure and chaste virgin-bride: her “Innocence,” “Virgin Modestie” and “vertue” militated against an immediate and willing compliance. Yet, he goes on to insist – perhaps in an attempt to justify to himself and to Raphael his intrusion upon her – that it was a mere show of reluctance on her part: “she would be woo’d, and not unsought be won.” The desire for union was mutual, but so that he might prize “her worth” and value her compliance more highly she “retir’d, / The more desirable.” Curiously, just as in Apollo’s eyes, Daphne’s beauty was enhanced by her flight: auctaque forma fuga est (Met. I.530),28 Adam implies that chastity, like beauty, may become a weapon of Cupid, one that paradoxically inflames the passion it apparently seeks to restrain. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden go further: they locate in Eve’s response here a calculated “erotics of delay”; adopting Adam’s male perspective without any apparent reservations, they conclude: “Eve has learned something from those moments in the libertine tradition that unexpectedly reaffirm the erotic value of modesty and withholding.29 In her yielding, there is a pretense of refusal” (41, emphasis added). But as Edwards has justly remarked, to accept only Adam’s viewpoint here is “to read partially, in both senses” (251). The very fact that even now Adam cannot let the matter drop suggests the extent of his uneasiness here: or to say all, Nature her self, though pure of sinful thought, Wrought in her so, that seeing me, she turn’d. (VIII. 505–7)

Adam offers yet another explanation: this time one that locates the reason for her turning from him outside of Eve herself, placing the responsibility squarely onto Nature’s shoulders, and thereby making it a reassuringly “natural” response, but one which in turn must be qualified, “though pure of sinful thought.” It also seems significant that Adam glosses over his pursuit of the fleeing Eve in two short clauses stripped bare of all circumstantial detail, “seeing me, she turn’d; / I follow’d her.” It is clear from Eve’s rendering of this moment that, as Lee Morrissey wryly observes, “she did more than simply turn back and he did more

28 Forma encompasses “beauty” as well as “shape,” and, as DuRocher has pointed out, Ovid’s usage frequently places emphasis on the former rather than the latter sense of the word. Here, however, DuRocher finds: “a delicately balanced instance of both possibilities” (136, note 49). 29 Compare Etherege’s lines in “The Imperfect Enjoyment”: “She does my Love resist with a pleasing force; / Mov’d not with Anger, but with Modesty,” where the poet is careful to emphasize that the woman’s struggle is with herself, and not his brute force; her resistance nevertheless enhances his pleasure.

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than follow” (333). Likewise the actual moment of consent, if there was one, is passed over without elaboration before the generalized, distancing lines ... she what was Honour knew, And with obsequious Majestie approv’d My pleaded reason. (VIII.508–10)

In this summary of his courtship of Eve, Adam actively conceals any indication of a conflict of wills between them; he merely states that Eve was eventually won over by his “pleaded reason” (VIII.510). But if we put this beside Eve’s more detailed version of events, Adam’s urgent address to Eve, like the ardent Apollo’s impassioned rhetoric, bespeaks more of his own emotional needs than rehearses a reasoned argument of love’s mutual benefits. Karen Edwards maintains that the outcome is the same in both versions: “In her account and in his, Eve eventually turns back, or re-turns, to Adam” (251), though she acknowledges that the two representations differ significantly in that: “Eve’s account suggests that Adam overrides her hesitation, which implies difference from him; Adam’s account suggests that there is no more hesitation, and hence no more difference, to be overridden” (252). Indeed, taken as a whole, the passage itself enacts Adam’s difficulties in constructing a willing and desirous Eve, as Edward’s careful and sensitive reading persuasively demonstrates: Syntactically, it is unusually involuted ... marked by a striking degree of alliteration (virgin and virtue; worth, would, wooed, and won; obvious, obtrusive, and obsequious; say, self, sinful, so, and seeing), rhyme (brought, unsought, thought, and wrought), and near-rhyme (retired and desirable)—qualities emphasizing its constructed, highly wrought, nature ... The poem knows (even if Adam and some critics do not) that construing resistance as coyness takes some effort. (251)

However, in neither version of events is it perhaps quite so transparently clear that Eve actually turns back towards Adam in the way that Edwards suggests. According to Eve, Adam eventually caught up with her and grasped her hand; in Adam’s account, there is simply a narrative gap at this point, revealingly marked by caesura: “I follow’d her, she what was Honour knew” (VIII.508). Nor does it seem altogether coincidental that, when Adam relates how he “led her” (VIII.511) to the nuptial bower, he invokes the same form of words he had just previously used to describe how Eve had first approached him, “Led by her Heav’nly Maker” (VIII.485) as if to sanction the view that he is simply assuming a divinely appointed role at this point. Although recounted objectively by the narrator, the tale of Apollo’s love for the unyielding Daphne likewise involves the vivid experience of contrasting perspectives for its full effect. While for Adam and the reader alike, the silence maintained by Eve in both accounts attracts interpretative ingenuity but resists a final and definitive reading, the meaning of Daphne’s silence in the closing lines of her story similarly demands a careful response. After Daphne has taken refuge in


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laurel, Apollo proposes that she become his tree rather than his bride. In a gesture of triumphant self-assertion, he attempts to wrest the significance of the laurel away from its inherent meaning: rather than being an emblem that recalls Daphne’s chastity and her flight from love, he converts it from a symbol of the defeat of his amorous intentions into a symbol celebrating his victory over Python, signifying his especial attributes, his lyre and ever-youthful locks, not her unbound tresses. Apollo’s words here demonstrate the power of the speaker to impose meaning on events. After Apollo has finished speaking, the final lines do initially seem to close the gap between Daphne’s perspective and Apollo’s by suggesting that Daphne herself consented to his proposal: factis modo laurea ramis / adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen (“The laurel shook her new-made branches, and seemed to nod her tree-top in assent” (Met. I.566–7). She seemed to nod her head in approval. In whose eyes? Daphne’s acquiescence to the deity’s adoption of her as his emblem is focalized through Apollo himself. Ovid thus calls into question the movement that shakes the tree top, drawing attention to its ambivalent significance: is it a gesture of assent, or an action denoting fear or resistance, as line 556 might indicate (oscula dat lingo: refugit tamen oscula lignum; “He kissed the wood; but even the wood recoiled from his kisses”)? Again, perhaps, if Daphne has been entirely assimilated into the laurel, and has already descended into an unreflecting vegetative state, it is merely the effect of wind through the leaves and thus utterly meaningless. It is, then, at best a gesture of ambiguous meaning, at worst an action that bears no meaning at all. The narrator cannot decide between the alternatives, but that in itself constitutes at least a withholding of endorsement for Apollo’s attempt to claim Daphne’s willing participation in a joint future, which is accordingly seen to be of dubious worth.30 VII Putting aside these complicating effects for the moment, let us recap the main outlines of the situation at this point: her Maker has guided Eve to Adam, marriage and motherhood as her best option, but the decision to reject or accept Adam is hers alone. The comments of Daniel Rogers on the curtailment of a woman’s freedom in marriage seem apposite here. To those who would argue that it is “an hard task for a woman so farre to deny her self” as to be subject to another, he replied, God ... puts this burden of subjection upon no woman who takes not the yoke of marriage upon her selfe; which the Lord doth force upon none, but allows each woman to be her owne Refuser, and to chuse her self (if she can) such a man as she can yeeld subjection unto. (259–60)

30 The ambiguity of this movement is suggestively discussed in a number of recent essays; see, for example, Farrell (134–5), and Feldherr (172–3).

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It also seems significant to remember at this point that what particularly distinguishes Daphne from other virginal figures in Ovid is not simply an aversion to sex – though that remains a significant factor – but a desire for self-determination and an aversion to any form of male domination or control, sexual or otherwise: multi illam petiere, illa aversata petentes inpatiens expersque viri nemora avia lustrat. (Met. I.478–9) Her, many sought: but she, averse to all, Unknowne to Man, nor brooking such a thrall Frequents the pathlesse Woods. (Sandys)

Moreover, the repeated references to Eve’s yielding (IV.309, 310; 489) and submission (IV.310; 498), taken together with her “meek surrender” (IV.494) and Adam’s “Absolute rule” (IV.301), do seem to make the relation of Adam to Eve one of conquest and dominion, even if eventually Eve herself willingly surrendered her freedom and autonomous status. Eve’s initial reluctance is not a tangential complexity: it coheres not only with Narcissus’ rejection of all other claims on him but that of self, but also with Daphne’s disengagement from society and withdrawal into the wild, her insistent rejection of the expected role of wife and mother, and her denial of her father’s repeated claim that she owed him a son-in-law and grandchildren: saepe pater dixit “generum mihi, filia, debes,” saepe pater dixit “debes mihi, nata, nepotes.” (Met. I.481–2) Often her father said: “You owe me a son-in-law, my girl.” Often her father said, “Daughter, you owe me grandsons.”

In God’s speech to the virgin Eve He delicately pronounces her sexual maturity and readiness for her future roles as bride and mother, according equal emphasis to each: to the satisfaction of her yearning for love, and to her elevation to a more exalted position as “Mother of human Race” (IV.470–475). According to this projected future, virgin, bride and mother are thus three points spanning the continuum of natural human development. It follows, therefore, that retardation at the first stage of development is potentially unhealthy and unnatural. In the same way, Britomart, Spenser’s exemplar of chastity, is not conceived as vowing perpetual virginity: virginity is not regarded as an end in itself, but as a temporary state before her eventual fulfilment and fruition in marriage to Artegall and in the “famous Progeny / which from them springen shall” (FQ. III.iii). Yet after God has led her from maidenhood to wedlock, Eve turns away from Adam and seeks to return to her prior condition by the lake and retain her virgin state. While Eve attempts to exclude Adam from her world, clinging to her individuality and singleness, there exists a great tension between her life-giving and life-denying potential. Her potential for good and evil is thus initially defined in terms of fruitfulness and sterility. From this perspective Daphne and Narcissus may both be seen as manifestations of the same element of destructive sterility


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latent in Eve. Golding continues to hold Daphne before us as a model of an exemplary chastity, “A mirror of viginity”: “Which yielding neither unto fear, nor force, nor flattery / Doth purchase everlasting fame and immortality” (“Epistle of 1567,” 68–70). Sandys too extracts the same moral from Ovid’s tale: “Daphne is changed into a never-withering tree, to shew what immortall honour a virgin obtaines by preserving her chastity” (74). However, for some commentators and poets in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fate of Daphne came to bear a rather more ambivalent interpretation. Although John Brinsley acknowledged Daphne’s transformation into laurel to be “the reward of chastity” (75), he evidently found her general conduct improper, anti-social and far from exemplary: he labels her a “male content [sic]” because she lived “all alone without a husband” (79). Spenser, raised in the Petrarchan tradition of the fair, proud, mistress who remained icily aloof, impervious to her admirer’s fiery passion, was quick to perceive and exploit the obvious correspondence between his own frustrated passion and that of Phoebus Apollo, the god of poetry himself. For when Petrarchan romantic love was coupled with the new Protestant emphasis upon married love as “the ambition of virginity” (Rogers, 7) and marriage became esteemed as “a state in it selfe, farre more excellent than the condition of a single life” (Perkins, 11), it was natural that the traditional moral of the tale should be reversed and that the consummation of love in marriage should become the overriding value. In accordance with this inversion of values, the significance of Daphne’s metamorphosis was also reversed: instead of a reward for the virtuous preservation of virginity, it became a punishment meted out for excessive pride. In Spenser’s Amoretti the example of Daphne’s unhappy fate is employed in an attempt to persuade his lady to relent towards him. Let the “laurell leafe,” he admonishes, ... put you in mind of that proud mayd, whom now those leaues attyre: Proud Daphne scorning Phaebus louely fyre, on the Thessalian shore from him did flie: for which the gods in theyr reuengefull yre did her transforme into a laurell (Amoretti xxviii.7–12)

Phoebus’ ardent desire, his “louely fyre,” is seen as inherently good and beneficial, like the sun’s life-giving rays with which it is appropriately identified. Spenser proceeds to point a very different lesson from the orthodox moral when he concludes in the final couplet: “Then fly no more fayre loue from Phebus chace, / But in your brest his leafe and loue embrace” (Amoretti xxviii.13–14). Surprisingly, even Milton’s famous celebration of chastity, A Masque Presented at Ludlow (1634), takes account of this understanding of Daphne’s metamorphosis. There it is similarly used by Comus as an exemplum of retributive justice: it is a punishment that deprives those who have denied the life of the senses of sensation itself. “If I but wave this wand,” he threatens the Lady: Your nervs are all chain’d up in Alablaster, And you a statue; or as Daphne was Root-bound, that fled Apollo. (Comus 659–62)

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Milton himself is not directly countenancing this interpretation of her transformation, of course, since it is put into the mouth of the extreme sensualist Comus, who, in Milton’s mythography, is the son of the enchantress Circe. Comus has inherited his mother’s skill with potions, and those he tempts to drink from his “banefull cup” (525) are transformed into “the inglorious likenes of a beast” (528), forgetting their humanity, “To roule with pleasure in a sensual stie” (77). However, the very inclusion of this reading of Daphne’s transformation is not without significance, especially when coupled with the threat of a Pygmalion-style metamorphosis in reverse. The Lady is not simply immobilized,31 but fixed in a state that expresses her essential qualities of enticing beauty but unyielding chastity. The emphasis thrown forward onto the suggestive compound “Root-bound” helps ensure that it remains a hauntingly powerful evocation of the life-denying aspect of Daphne’s chastity. Milton’s expression may have been inspired by the crucial moment in Ovid’s account which enacts her assimilation into laurel: torpor gravis occupat artus and pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret (“a heavy numbness seizes her limbs” and “Her feet, but now so swift, are fixed in sluggish roots,” Met. I.548, 551). The first line suggests the paralysis that overtakes Daphne in mid-flight, while the second, through the telling juxtaposition of velox and pigris (“swift” and “sluggish”), emphasizes what is lost through the transformation. Although Daphne is deprived of that fleetness of foot which has characterized her flight in the narrative, her shining beauty is preserved forever in her new form: remanet nitor unus in illa (Met. I.552). Ovid had earlier drawn attention to the uncompromising division in her nature that will doom Daphne’s resolve to remain a virgin: ... sed te decor iste, quod optas, esse vetat, votoque tuo tua forma repugnat. (Met. I.488–9) But that grace of yours forbids the fulfilment of your desire, and your beauty opposes your prayer.

Her alluring physical beauty will frustrate (repugnare, literally “to fight against”) her desire for sexual self-determination. Her metamorphosis mends this selfdivision but at a price: now in a sexually unassailable form, the beauty of the laurel acts as a poignant reminder of the tragic discrepancy between Daphne’s outer appearance and inner will. A tension is thereby established between what is gained and what is lost through the metamorphosis, a tension the Ovidian narrator makes no attempt to resolve. 31 Although she has lost her freedom of movement because her body is “In stony fetters fixed and motionless” (Comus 819), the Lady’s freedom of mind persists within her “corporal rind” (Comus 664). There is also the suggestion of Daphne’s continuing presence within the bark that has enveloped her: as Apollo places his hand upon the laurel he can feel her rapidly beating heart and the wood attempts to shrink away from the kisses and embraces it is now forced to endure (Met. I.554–6).


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According to one possible line of interpretation, then, Daphne’s rivalry with Diana (Met. I.476) had cost her dearly – she lost her very humanity by it. Daphne had only been able to evade the consequences of Phoebus’ pursuit and preserve her virginity by taking refuge in metamorphosis. She had craved perpetual virginity as a boon from her father, urging the precedent of Jupiter’s assent to his daughter Diana’s request (Met. I. 486–7), so when her outstanding beauty threatened to end her virgin state her father was obliged to transform it. The tree’s beauty may be ever-green (“perpetuos semper gere frondis honores,” Met. I.565), but it is also barren. Apollo’s love for Daphne is sterilem ... amorem, “a fruitless love” (Met. I.496), when compared with the promise of fruitfulness that was implicit in the nymph’s beauty and the consummation of love. The two divergent readings of the Daphne myth thus depend upon an inherent ambivalence in the concept of metamorphosis itself.32 Since the same myth could be used to support conflicting ideals, Daphne’s story became a shifting symbol giving form to an ambiguity. Succeeding treatments of the Daphne myth tend to affirm unequivocally the nature of the summum bonum endorsed, whether sexual fruition or the more orthodox moral value of chastity. Nevertheless, when the reader first encounters Ovid’s tale reset in Paradise Lost Milton seems to have preserved something of this ambivalence of value. However, at the conclusion of the episode, Milton appears to resolve the ambiguity, leaving in no doubt which is to be preferred. In the unfallen world, sensuous delight is inherently good; Paradise is no place for the ascetic denial of pleasurable sensation. When Eve finally succumbs to Adam, Milton celebrates the supremacy of the dynamic power of love and desire over a passive, enclosed symbol of chastity. Although whether at first Eve actually consents or merely submits to Adam’s embrace is left discreetly veiled in ambiguity, from this point on she ceases to resist his approaches actively. Whereas Daphne’s fine but frigid beauty had inflamed Phoebus with an ardent passion she could not reciprocate, Eve apparently transfixed by Love’s golden shaft, is finally led from virginal seclusion to the bower of nuptial bliss. While the radiant vision of Adam and Eve thus “Imparadis’t in one anothers arms” (IV.506) does not entirely dispel the penumbra of half-glimpsed, halfdeveloped conflicts, the scene resolves itself into a brief but powerfully charged image of their present idyllic relationship. Adam prevents Eve’s return to a deathly self-absorption; we are not privy to a detailed account of his method, only that Eve yields, “blushing like the Morn” (VIII.511). If shame seems out of place in Eden, 32 Feldherr has similarly noted, “how interpretation of the poem’s thematic emphasis hinges on the reading of a metamorphosis” (173). According to Rees, however, Ovid’s attitude is straightforward and unambiguous: in “the story as told by Ovid ... the metamorphosis into a laurel is the consequence of Daphne’s own request, and its continual greenness immortalizes her virgin honour, without hint of regret for sterility” (252–3), but this reading fails to take any account of Ovid’s explicit reference to Apollo’s sterilem ... amorem (Met. I.496).

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we can perhaps allow for a blush of flattered shyness, even of arousal; in any case, Eve is not reduced and dehumanized as was Daphne – rather, she is seduced out of narcissism. The end speaks for itself: Milton conjures up a scene of innocent but unequivocal sensuality in which the realities of desire and sexual fulfilment are not evaded, but sheathed in mythological simile. As Eve finishes speaking, she embraces Adam and ... with eyes Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d, And meek surrender, half imbracing leand On our first Father, half her swelling Breast Naked met his under the flowing Gold Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight Both of her Beauty and submissive Charms Smil’d with superior Love, as Jupiter On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds That shed May Flowers. (IV.492–501)

Chapter 3

Maiden, Bride and Mother: Three Faces of Eve Is there no change of death in paradise Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky Unchanging. (Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” 6.1–4)

Milton’s Eden is no allegorical or emblematic landscape but a garden of earthly delights, a real, physical garden with an abundance of flowers and fruit trees, and, at its centre, is Eve. Once the Daphne myth is no longer compatible with Eve’s expanding experience, another organizing image is secured to help amplify and articulate her role in the epic. Just as the story of Narcissus and his reflection blended into the story of Daphne’s flight from Apollo, the stories of Daphne and Flora now meld together. The hint of coercion in Eve’s tale is qualified by her present happiness, Daphne transformed not into a tree, but into Flora, goddess of flowers. Having used Ovid’s Daphne to suggest deeper currents of fear and subjugation, Milton then reinvents his source, for his Daphne is not reduced by Adam’s desire but freed from narcissism to fruition. I Chloris – Flora – Mater Florum As the narrative convention in medieval and early Renaissance paintings permitted consecutive episodes from a story to be depicted as separate scenes in a single but composite design, so, in a comparable manner, Eve’s reminiscences enable Milton to interweave events of the “past” with the narrative “present.” Portrayed in the background is the beautiful but reluctant virgin, unwilling to submit to her lover’s embraces, whilst in the foreground, and gaining greater prominence thereby, stands the happy bride, eyes flashing with open desire. The stories of Daphne and Flora prove surprisingly complementary, easily dovetailing to give additional narrative coherence to Milton’s amplification of Genesis. These two Ovidian myths are

As Sarah Annes Brown has suggested: “Simply reproducing an original, it could be argued, does not signal the same depth of engagement as does an accomplished variation on a recurring theme” (157); Milton’s re-working of the Daphne myth demonstrates his internalization of Ovidian structures more than would straightforward imitations of them.


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made to merge together almost imperceptibly, and then to act in unison. Milton thus interweaves two separate strands to form a new pattern of meaning. Both myths are tales of pursuit and metamorphosis, though the emphasis accorded these common elements differs significantly in each case. Apollo’s pursuit and Daphne’s flight are central to her story and are thus narrated at length by Ovid. While Flora’s account includes mention of her flight from the pursuing Zephyr, it is clearly peripheral to the dominant motifs of her story – desire resolved in married love, fulfilment and fruitfulness – and is accordingly passed over in a perfunctory manner: ver erat, errabam: Zephyrus conspexit, abibam. insequitur, fugio: fortior ille fuit. (Fasti V.201–2) “It was spring, I was out on a ramble. Zephyr caught sight of me; I retreated. He pursued me, I fled; he was stronger.”

Flora’s brisk summary merely gestures towards the incident. Her unelaborated account makes clear that she will not dwell on the past: her will was forced, to be sure, but all has turned out for the best. Zephyr’s desire was not merely a passing urge for sexual gratification but an enduring love, for she now enjoys a happy marriage and a more exalted position as goddess of flowers. Flora’s metamorphosis is not a change of shape, but a refining process: she evolves from virgin to bride, from nymph to goddess; in contrast, Daphne retains her virgin state but in direct consequence loses her human form completely and eventually even sentience itself. Daphne’s metamorphosis effectively curtails her personal history, Flora’s opens up new possibilities and a role of expanded meaning and significance. Flora’s story can thus be said to take over where Daphne’s left off: the latter’s situation is summarily restated, her story resumed and developed further. The story of the wind god Zephyr’s ardent pursuit of Chloris, their marriage and her subsequent elevation to the rank of goddess as mater florum (“mother of flowers,” Fasti V.183) is related by Ovid alone of the Roman poets. In an interview given by the goddess, recorded in the fifth book of the Fasti devoted to the month of May, the story of her transformation develops from a playful piece of etymology in which Flora supposes that her Roman name is a corruption of the Greek form Chloris (Fasti V.195–6). But Ovid also suggests that the myth has an aetiological significance. His unique identification of the earth nymph Chloris with Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, as the “before” and “after” phases of a metamorphosis, Chloris eram, quae Flora vocor (“I used to be Chloris who am

Though, as we have seen, there is a suggestion that her suffering may be intensified, at least temporarily, by the retention of human consciousness after her transformation (Met. I.554–6), and compare Io’s acute distress when she realizes that she has been transformed into a heifer (Met. I.635–41). Wind (101) also draws attention to this point.

Maiden, Bride and Mother

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now called Flora,” Fasti V.195, emphases added), explains the transformation of the bare earth in springtime as the cold earth is warmed by the spring breeze. Ovid implies that the change involved a more profound metamorphosis both in the earth and in Chloris herself. Until Chloris became Flora through her fruitful union with Zephyr, the earth had been of one colour, unius tellus ante coloris erat (Fasti V.222). Flora herself acknowledges the change and draws a distinction between her present status as goddess of flowers and her former condition as a nymph of the happy fields (Chloris eram, nymphe campi felicis, Fasti V.197), symbolized in the covering of her implied nakedness (quae fuerit mihi forma, grave est narrare modestae, Fasti V.199) with a colourful robe richly embroidered with flowers (sic haec est cultu versicolore decens, Fasti V.356) that mirrors the changes in the bare earth at springtime from the “first green shoots of plants” (χλόρη, η) to the variety of spring flowers (Fasti V.358). It is, moreover, a thematic progression that is clearly restated in Raphael’s account of the Earth’s evolution in the process of creation. After the Son’s fructifying word, the transfiguration of the Earth is expressly described in terms of enrobing a naked woman: ... the bare Earth, till then Desert and bare, unsightly, unadorn’d, Brought forth the tender Grass whose verdure clad Her Universal Face with pleasant green, Then Herbs of every leaf, that sudden flour’d Op’ning thir various colours, and made gay Her bosom smelling sweet ... [ ... ] ... Earth in her rich attire Consummate lovly smil’d. (VII.313–19; 501–2)

Though he makes no mention of Ovid’s identification of her with Flora, the entry for “Cloris” in E. K.’s “Glosse” for “Aprill” in The Shepheardes Calendar by Spenser draws attention to the connotations of her name: the name of a Nymph, and signifieth greenesse, of whom is sayd, that Zephyrus the Westerne wind being in loue with her, and coueting her to wife, gaue her for a dowrie, the chiefedome and soueraigntye of al flowers and greene herbes, growing on earth. As Kilgour has noted: “Ovid himself is the source of the story that Flora was originally a Greek nymph named Chloris. His myth goes flagrantly against the obvious fact that, as the exasperated Frazer notes in his Loeb edition, ‘Flora is obviously from flos, and has nothing to do with Chloris’ (274)” (4). In her otherwise illuminating article on “Eve and Flora,” Kilgour claims that “Chloris [is] roaming among the springtime flowers” when she “is seen and pursued by Zephyr” (2, emphasis added). However, fundamental to Ovid’s aetiological tale is the transformation of the bare earth in springtime brought about through their union. In the lines that directly follow (VII.313–14), Raphael twice mentions the Earth’s unsightly bareness to emphasize the imminent metamorphosis of her appearance. In contrast, the naked Eve is most perfectly adorned.

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Whilst the name Chloris as well as suggesting greenness implies unripeness (χλωρός, ά, ον), Flora, as well as its obvious connection with flowers, suggests fullness and maturity and also holds the promise of fruitfulness. Flora herself takes care to instruct Ovid and his readers on this very point: Forsitan in teneris tantum mea regna coronis Esse putes? Tangit numen et arva meum. Si bene flouerint segetes, erit area dives; Si bene flouerit vinea, Bacchus erit; Si bene flouerint oleae, nitidissimus annus, Pomaque proventum temporis huius habent. (Fasti V.261–6) Perhaps you may think that my realm is confined to delicate garlands? But my power extends to the fields as well. If the crops have flowered well, the threshing-floor will be rich; if the vines have flowered well, there will be wine; if the olive-trees have flowered well, most rich will be the year, and the fruit harvest takes its success from this time.

Taking the instantaneous maturity of Adam and Eve as a given of Milton’s account, C. S. Lewis insisted that the reader could never associate either Adam or Eve with “the primitive, the unsophisticated, the naïf” (116). His discussion of Adam and Eve before the Fall significantly omits even a brief consideration of the implications of Eve’s speech of recollection in order to concentrate on the assured and formal manner which subsequently characterizes their marital relationship. Drawing attention to the way in which, “Until they are fallen and robbed of their original majesty, they hardly ever address each other by their names, but by stately periphrases,” Lewis concludes, “their life together is ceremonial – a minuet” (119). Marjorie Hope Nicolson has also stressed this decorous and stately manner, seemingly concurring with Lewis in her impression of them as “Beautiful moving statues ... models of a great impassivity” (239). This significantly ignores the initial energy displayed by Eve when, in full flight, she will not respond to Adam’s addresses; like Daphne, she wastes no words on her pursuer. If Eve has a statuesque quality at this point, it must be a statue modelled by Bernini, instinct with movement and feeling. Yet, as in the case of Flora, after Eve’s marriage there remains little obvious trace of the unrestrained vigour of her initial flight. We find instead the poise and easy assurance of the first bride and mother of mankind. Unlike the transformation of Daphne, the metamorphoses of Chloris and Eve may be likened to a sublimating process that also encompasses a change of attitude in the “victim,” and is thus accomplished to the mutual satisfaction of lover and beloved, the promise of beauty is sweetly fulfilled as the virgin becomes a bride. Flora remarks with telling equanimity: vim tamen emendat dando mihi nomina nuptae (“Yet he made amends for the rape by bestowing on me the title of bride,” Fasti V.205). The pursuit and subsequent metamorphosis has beneficial rather than tragic consequences, and so there persist no lingering doubts as to what is lost as a result of the transformation. The first mother of mankind and the mother of flowers are made by Milton to seem closer in actuality as well as in spirit and thematic importance than could otherwise have been expected.


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Unlike the fleeting comparison of Eve with Pales (IX.393), “the country goddess” (rustica ... dea, Fasti IV.744) and “lady of shepherds” (pastorum dominae, Fasti IV.776), Flora persists as a mythic analogue to Eve, sustained by a number of peculiarly apt and suggestive correspondences. Just as Zephyr endowed Flora with the originary flower garden and her especial role as guardian of flowers as a wedding gift (Fasti V.211–12), Eve assumes special responsibility for the flowers of Eden: the “Flours / Imborderd on each Bank” disclose “the hand of Eve” (IX.437–8). Flora describes her happy position thus: vere fruor semper: semper nitidissimus annus, arbor habet frondes, pabula semper humus. est mihi fecundus dotalibus hortus in agris: aura fovet, liquidae fonte rigatur aquae. (Fasti V.207–10) I enjoy perpetual spring; always the year is radiant, the trees have leaves, the earth always has pasture. I have a fruitful garden in the fields that are my dower, fanned by the breeze and watered by a spring of running water.

Eve is similarly pictured in a magical garden where “Rose a fresh Fountain, and with many a rill” watered the plants (IV.229–30), against a backcloth of perpetual spring where “vernal aires”: Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance Led on th’Eternal Spring. (IV.264–8)

It seems hardly coincidental then that Flora, later in the same passage from the Fasti quoted above, had described the daily approach of both the Hours and Graces to her own garden (V.215–20) to mark the rhythmic regularity that patterns the day. This bears comparison with the dance of the seasons that Eve herself presides over in Paradise. Here the dance enacts the special conditions that obtain in Eden, where the fairness of spring and the fruitfulness of autumn are found together: “Spring and Autumn here / Danc’d hand in hand” (V.394–5). Although he acknowledges Flora’s role as patroness of prostitutes, Ovid significantly tones down the licentious elements in his portrayal of the goddess. In the Fasti, Flora exudes erotic charm yet gains respectability from her representation as a contented married woman (V.205–6). Like Flora, Eve is as much lover as wife, and lives in an idyllic world where love is open and frank and where romance is real and imminent from dawn to dusk. Adam wakes and

Knott has also drawn attention to Eve’s association with Flora (115–16). Pronounced interest in Eve’s role as genius loci has been shown in a number of recent articles, most notably, those by Friedman and Hiltner. For further discussion of this aspect to Eve’s role in the garden, see Chapter 5.


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... on his side Leaning half-rais’d, with looks of cordial Love Hung over her enamour’d, and beheld Beautie, which whether waking or asleep, Shot forth peculiar Graces; then with voice Milde, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes, Her hand soft touching, whisper’d thus. Awake … (V.11–17)

This passage evokes an exquisitely poetical and tender visual impression of “wedded Love” (IV.750) for which Ovid can only supply the barest of hints as Flora discreetly intimates, inque non est ulla querella toro (“and there are no complaints in my bed,” Fasti V.206). Eve’s alignment with Flora relates pointedly to her present and future roles, defining their positive aspects. Most obviously, it highlights Eve’s present position as happy young bride with tutelage of flowers. But the constant and loving attention she devotes to the young charges that as yet fill “Her Nurserie” (VIII.46) gives ample evidence of her fitness as the designated mother of mankind and prompts the reader to bear in mind this important dimension to her future role. Grossman has argued for the significance of the way in which “Eve’s promised empowerment as ‘mother of human race’ is deferred beyond the bounds of the poem,” but Eve’s mothering of the flowers10 doubles both to suggest and to anticipate her importance as the “Mother of all Mankind, / Mother of all things living” (XI.160–161) by stressing the virtuality of her motherhood.11 The triadic sequence, Chloris-Flora-Mater florum, corresponding to the unfolding pattern, maiden-bride-mother, is thus now complete: Eve the bride is framed not only by her past as the chaste reluctant virgin but also by her future as the prospective mother of mankind. By articulating his initial study of Eve around the three phases of this developing sequence, Milton is able to enmesh the past and future in the narrative present, taking the reader’s awareness beyond the immediate temporal significance. This gradual process of becoming thus seems to take place both inside and outside of time. As usual, Milton has it both ways: on the one hand, he preserves the impression of a prelapsarian state of innocence as a timeless

Walker (1988, 8), where she is commenting on Grossman’s line of argument (148–68). Demetrakopoulos assigns a very different relationship to Eve and the flowers of Eden; she maintains that as “Archetypal Flower Goddess, [Eve] ascends over them. They become precursors of her future Circean herd” (105). 11 As Newton observed in his note to XI.159, the name “Eve” was generally held to have been derived “from a Hebrew verb which signifies to live.” Milton’s Adam, in his divinely ordained capacity as “name giver,” had understood her nature and instinctively called God’s new creation, “Eve.” Gallagher has drawn attention to the way Milton “dignifies Eve as the progenitrix of the human race”; for, he explains, “the fact that woman’s primordial vocation precedes her original sin (for Satan deceived not Eve but “The mother of mankind”) implies her redemption before her fall (deceived or not, she is saved for motherhood as much as by it)” (52). 10


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efflorescence of perfection; on the other, Eve breaks out of the eternal present and the mould of frozen perfection and displays a potentiality for development that at the same time must involve a potentiality for stagnation or decay. After the sentence of exile has been pronounced by Michael, Eve cannot contain her grief, which breaks out in a lament for the flowers she must leave behind in Eden. In this highly charged apostrophe to the flowers of Paradise, which, because of its intensity of feeling and pointed detail, has sounded to many a reader like a mother’s passionate grief for her lost children, the reader learns that the flowers of Eden had been reserved for Eve to name ... O flours, That never will in other Climate grow, My early visitation, and my last At Eev’n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye Names,12 Who shall reare ye to the Sun ... (XI.273–8)

This seems a particularly significant addition to Genesis by Milton, which helps to confirm, ironically at the very moment when she loses it forever, Eve’s role as Flora, mater florum. II ‘Flowers and their fruit’: Proserpina, Ceres and the Way Things Might Have Been In the fallen world, the seasons are mutually exclusive: spring must be exchanged for autumn, autumn for winter. Time, whether regarded as linear or cyclical, is a postlapsarian dimension when change involves loss or even death. In Eden flowers and fruit are found together outside of the process of seasonal change. The simultaneity of the flowering and fruiting process is symbolized by another mythic configuration as, with a slight adjustment of focus, Eve is found to combine the qualities of both the maiden Proserpina and her mother Ceres. The young maiden is set by Ovid against a backcloth of perpetuum ver (Met. V.391), surrounded by the spring flowers that are her native element, whilst Ceres as virginis ... frugum genetrix (“mother of the virgin and of fruits,” Met.V.489–90) embodies the ripe fruitfulness of motherhood and autumn.13 In this way the composite image of Eve as both Proserpina and Ceres, maiden and mother, can be held to represent the distinctive quality of Eden which Eve shares as presiding spirit of a garden where 12 Gregerson has astutely contrasted the way “Adam names the animals in an explicit ceremony of sovereignty (VIII 338–54); Eve names the flowers (XI 275–9) as an aspect of nuturance” (187). 13 The zeugma of two objective genitives establishes Ceres’ maternal qualities.


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“Spring and Autumn ... / Danc’d hand in hand” (V.394–5). Eve’s primal state thus perfectly reflects that of the paradisal garden in which the fresh, floral beauty of “Spring / Perpetual ... with vernant Flours” (X.678–9) is combined with the luxuriant fruitfulness of “All Autumn pil’d” (V.394). The importance of Eve’s alignment with Proserpina has of course long been acknowledged. Eve is first implicated in Proserpina’s fate when Eden is contrasted with ... that faire field Of Enna,14 where Proserpin gathering flours Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world. (IV.268–72)

Here, it is generally agreed, the deeper value of the simile is to suggest that in Eden, as at Enna, the young and innocent will be abducted and deflowered by a power from the Underworld. Attentive to the nuances of Ovid’s treatment of the myth, Milton makes explicit the implicit comparison between the young goddess and the

Myers cites Metamorphoses V.535 in support of her claim that Proserpina is abducted from a garden (230, note 16). But this line, and the line that immediately follows, refer to the cultis ... hortis (“cultivated gardens”) in the Underworld from which Proserpina unguardedly takes the fruit that betrays her. DuRocher claims that “Ovid was the first to locate the rape of Proserpina in Enna” (79), but Cicero in Actionis Secundae in C. Verrem (The Second Speech Against Gaius Verres) had cited Enna as the traditional scene of the abduction (Henna autem, ubi ea quae dico gesta memorantur, II.iv.49). (Enna was sometimes transliterated as Henna to show that the initial E was aspirated in the original Greek.) Parish has quibbled over the extent of Ovidian influence on the location of Proserpina’s abduction in Milton’s text, pointing out that Ovid’s description of the locus amoenus from which Proserpina was snatched by Dis “is not really of a field” (333). Starnes and Talbert raised a similar objection. They maintain that Proserpina is gathering flowers “in a beautiful ‘grove’; no field is mentioned” (276). The difficulty stems from confining attention to only one of Ovid’s versions of the tale. Both are located at Henna, but in the Fasti, Ovid sets the scene thus: culto fertilis Henna solo (“fertile Henna with its tilled soil,” IV.422), while, even more suggestive, is the apostrophe to Henna which begins the account of Ceres’ desperate search for her missing daughter: Sic dea nec retinet gemitus et concita cursu / fertur et a campis incipit, Henna, tuis. (“The goddess did not keep back her groans and is driven at full speed on her journey. She begins with your fields, Henna”; Fasti IV.461–62, emphasis added). Such references from the Fasti should adequately account for Milton specifying the “field / Of Enna” (IV.268–9). However, it is interesting to note that in Book IX, the setting for Satan’s initial assault on Eve where he lurks, “hid among sweet Flours and Shades” (408) has more in common with the scene of the rape as Ovid outlines it in the Metamorphoses. Martz’s general observation that, “both of Ovid’s great treasuries of ancient myth tend to cohere within the context of Milton’s allusions” (227), seems worth bearing in mind here. 14


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flowers15 she gathers and strengthens the implied connection between Proserpina and Eve by applying the same metaphor to the latter on the morning of the Fall.16 Recognizing the importance of the mother as well as the daughter to Milton’s conception of Eve, Jonathan Collett has suggestively argued that Eve is a “composite of the innocent Proserpina and the sorrowing Ceres” (93), that is, Proserpina figures the prelapsarian, and Ceres the postlapsarian Eve. While such a neat formulation may seem initially attractive, it leaves out of account the narrator’s assurance that Eve, as she sets out to garden alone on the fateful morning of the Fall, resembled most closely “Ceres in her Prime” (IX.395). In his note on the passage, Fowler glosses “prime” thus: “in her best time; before the loss of Proserpina brought cares and suffering upon her,” while William Empson in a characteristically provocative, but brilliant note on the passage pointed out, “the very richness of the garden makes it heavy with autumn. Ceres when virgin of the queen of Hell was already in her full fruitfulness upon the world” (1935, 185). Critics have, however, tended to overlook the fertile role assigned to Eve before the Fall. George Koehler insists that “As fruit, the flower was no longer in Eve’s sphere” (15). Yet the text of the poem fails to sustain such an assertion: Eve assumes the roles of frugum genetrix as well as mater florum as she tends with a maternal solicitude to the “Fruits and Flours” that fill her “Nurserie” (VIII.44, 46). Indeed, Raphael – surveying the fruits Eve had piled high on the “ample Square” (V.393) of the table – makes explicit the unmistakable correlation between her destined fruitfulness and that of the garden in his prophetic utterance: Haile, Mother of Mankind, whose fruitful Womb Shall fill the World more numerous with thy Sons Then with these various fruits the Trees of God Have heap’d this Table. (V.388–91)

As Raphael’s exclamation reveals, Eve’s fruitfulness is implicit in the luxuriant abundance of the garden. She is virtually pregnant with the teeming life of the world. The potentiality for fruitfulness is certainly no greater after the Fall than before it. Adam and Eve had been charged with two positive commands that were essentially complementary: “to dress” the garden (IX.205) and to “multiply a Race of Worshippers” (VII.630) – in short, to be fruitful in the fullest sense. However, in accordance with her optimistic view of a “Fortunate Fall,” whereby “Eve is ‘deflowered’ (IX.901) to become fruitful,” Kathleen Swaim feels that when Milton likens Eve to Ceres “in her Prime / Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove” (IX.395–6) the emphasis “is on the unrealized fruitful potential of the goddess 15

While Proserpina is acknowledged to be “a fairer Floure” (IV.270), Eve herself is, of course, judged to be the “fairest ... Flour” (IX.432). 16 Though in his note on the passage, Bentley contemptuously dismisses the metaphor as out of keeping with epic decorum, “your Woman Flour is but fit for a Madrigal,” it powerfully intensifies the reader’s sense of Eve’s natural affinity with the garden.

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[Ceres]” (1973, 161). The importance of this poetic identification is undoubtedly accentuated by its position in the narrative, occurring at a crucial stage in events: Eve is about to leave Adam and innocence behind her. As the primary plot of the epic centres on the loss of original earthly perfection, it seems reasonable to assume that Milton would, at this critical juncture, choose rather to intensify the sense of loss by sharply posing – through the presentation of a fruitful Ceres as yet untouched by sorrow and suffering – the painless path to fruitfulness, originally offered to mankind by God, but forfeited through Adam and Eve’s disobedience. This reading would also account for the notoriously awkward attempt to airbrush Proserpina, and thereby all the associations of pain, transience, winter and death that her name inevitably invokes, out of the picture altogether. However, as is so often the case, Milton has it both ways, he succeeds in including what he ostensibly excludes by drawing attention to Proserpina and her fate by her absent presence here. The critical distinction between the conditions that obtain before and after the Fall largely centres upon the disparate nature of the paths by which man may reach the same final destination of “God-like fruition” (III.307). This is profoundly significant since it belies a common assumption that Milton subscribed unreservedly to the perilous doctrine of the felix culpa or Fortunate Fall.17 Raphael explains to Adam and Eve the gentle metamorphic process of refinement that unfallen mankind would have undergone until, turned “all to Spirit,” they would have made a “wingd ascen[t] / Ethereal” (V.497–9). The promised future, conditional upon their obedience, is imaged through the natural evolution of a plant, “by gradual scale sublim’d,” from the root to its culmination in “flours and thir fruit” (V.483, 482): So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More aerie, last the bright consummate floure Spirits odorous breathes. (V.479–82)

This image impresses itself upon Eve, not as a vehicle for conveying abstract ideas, but as a living example of the dynamic principle at work all around her in the garden. It has often been recognized that when framing his temptation Satan echoes, but subtly distorts, the nature of the promised elevation of mankind, deviously re-defining “death” to further his own purposes by assuring her: So ye shall die perhaps, but putting off Human, to put on Gods, death to be wisht, Though threat’nd. (IX.713–15) 17 See Lovejoy’s classic account. More recently, Swaim (1973) and Mulder (143) are amongst those who have assumed that Milton accepts the paradox of the Fortunate Fall. Conversely, see Bell, and Mollenkott who insists: ‘Redemption is ... the remedy, not the result, of the Fall” (1972, 3). The idea that life in the fallen world will be happier than the couple’s unfallen life in Eden is flatly contradicted by God’s words in Book XI: “Happier, had it suffic’d him to have known / Good by it self, and Evil not at all” (88–9).


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Satan thus cunningly discloses a perversion of the end of human existence, the goal from which he is seducing her. He offers to Eve a fast-track promotion: that she may anticipate the gradual ripening process outlined by Raphael, and seize immediately in her grasp the fruit of a life by “long obedience tri’d” (VII.159). The fruit thus “harshly pluckt” (XI.537) ensures that the alternative possibility remains unrealized, and the pattern of human life is abruptly propelled along a new trajectory as the flowers of innocence are prematurely shed in a process of forced fruitfulness. Though the storm that figures Satan’s assault on Eden and Eve seems entirely destructive, “an attack that scatters petals and seems to destroy harmony and design,” it is nevertheless, Swaim contends, “a violent bombardment of fructifying rain” (emphasis added) since, as she reasons, “the blossoms of fruit trees or even of roses in the process of time must be scattered to make way for the coming of fruit and harvest” (162). She thus interprets the metaphor at IX.432–3 – when Eve is glimpsed amongst her flowers, “Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, / From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh” – in a way that supports her view of the Fall as fortunate. According to her reading, “fruitfulness is an exclusively postlapsarian category” (159), and storms are therefore to be regarded as a necessary part of the more productive process of seasonal change whereby the flowers that characterized the perfect experience of innocence must yield to the fruit of spiritual endeavour. But it is surely time – the sequential nature of the postlapsarian dimension as opposed to the continuous unfolding present of the prelapsarian world – that is the exclusively “post-lapsarian category” here. Proserpina’s loss likewise ushered in the “Sithe of Time” (X.606) into an atemporal world, hitherto an inviolable pastoral landscape uninfected by change, decay and death. It was then that perpetual spring made way for the cycle of the seasons, and flowers were exchanged for fruit. In this way, Milton attunes his narrative to the resonant power that the story of the raptus virginis possessed as a seasonal myth. The division of Proserpina’s time between the upper and lower worlds was traditionally held to account for the cycle of the seasons and the consequent variations in the Earth’s fertility: Iuppiter ex aequo volventem dividit annum: nunc dea, regnorum numen commune duorum, cum matre est totidem, totidem cum coniuge menses. (Met. V.565–7) Jupiter divides the turning year into two equal parts. Now the goddess, the divinity of two realms alike, spends half the months with her mother and just so many with her husband.

George Sandys’ gloss upon Ovid’s lines reads thus: ... the Seed, which is Proserpina, while the Sun is on the south of the Aequinoctiall, lies hid in the earth, which is Pluto: but when he travells through the Northerne signes, it shouteth up, and growes to maturity: and then Proserpina is said to be above with Ceres. (260)

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The uniquely tempered climatic conditions in the garden ensure the simultaneity of the flowering and fruiting process in Eden: fruits do not appear after the flowers sequentially in time, rather there is a complex, synchronic pattern, a perpetual round outside the process of seasonal change. Plants stand immune beyond the reach of decay, corruption, time, winter and death, those forces that render beauty frail and ephemeral. In the continuous unfolding present of unfallen Eden, however, flowers do not have to be sacrificed for fruit. Moreover, since the uniformly temperate climate of Eden creates the conditions necessary for maximum fruitfulness, a storm can only be a destructive force, signifying a point of reversal, and the irruption of evil into a perfect world. The reader is thus drawn to make ever-deepening inferences concerning the essential distinction between the prelapsarian and the fallen world. In the unfallen world, the withering blasts of a storm must be regarded as wholly baneful and noxious in themselves, leading only to barrenness and infertility. Indeed, after the Fall, such “mortal change” (X.273) becomes inherent in the very nature of things, and is especially evident in the conditions affecting fruitfulness. The storm may thus be seen to anticipate the consequences of the abrupt and premature end of Paradise, brought about by the invasion of Sin and Death who, “With travail difficult” (X.593), bring to birth a new world in which the balance has been disrupted to produce violent extremes. The uniform climate designed to foster growth is now characterized by harsh extremes that mar and impede it. Milton grimly catalogues the dramatic effect of this general dislocation: ... The Sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the Earth with cold and heat Scarce tollerable, and from the North to call Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring Solstitial summers heat. (X.651–6)

The wandering planets are instructed how to form conjunctions “Of noxious efficacie, and when to joyne / In Synod unbenigne,” so too the fixed stars are taught: Thir influence malignant when to showre, Which of them rising with the Sun, or falling, Should prove tempestuous. (X.660–664)

The gentle breezes and “vernal aires” (IV.264) that made “ease / More easie” (IV.329–30) are exchanged for intemperate gales that blast from every direction (X.695–706). Following the loss of Proserpina, Ovid summarily records a similarly radical change to extreme, adverse conditions that militate against growth and fruitfulness. The land is cursed: fertilitas terrae latum vulgata per orbem falsa iacet: primis segetes moriuntur in herbis,


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et modo sol nimius, nimius modo corripit imber, sideraque ventique nocent, ... ... lolium tribulique fatigant triticeas messes et inexpugnabile gramen. (Met.V.481–6) The land’s fertility spread abroad through the wide world now plays false: the crops die in first leaf, attacked now by too much sun, now by too much rain. Stars and winds cause harm ... tares and thistles and persistent grasses wear down the wheat harvest.

The chiastic pattern centred around the caesura in line 483, modo ... nimius, nimius modo (“now too much” ... “now too much”), accentuates the way the conditions that had fostered fruitfulness have now been thrown out of balance and become destructive agencies. The difficult conditions and troublesome weeds which infest the ground after the loss of Proserpina are reminiscent of the effects of the sentence pronounced upon Adam and Eve by the Son, which – on both the literal and metaphorical levels of meaning – centre upon the “sharp tribulation” (XI.63) that now characterizes the struggle for fruitfulness in the new conditions that obtain in the fallen world. The otium of their “sweet” and “pleasant” labour (IV. 328, 625) in a garden that naturally tended to overabundance is replaced by onerous labor, “till day droop” (IX.178), tilling the ground now cursed to bring forth, “Thorns also and Thistles ... / Unbid” (X.203–4). By a common process of metaphoric transference these weeds were generally held to represent the vices, which are as “weedes growing in our owne garden issuing from the corrupted roote of our nature” (Goodman, 114). Eve, who for her part was to “multiply a Race of worshippers” (VII.630) with the ease with which she had effortlessly gathered, “All seasons, ripe for use” (V.323), must now bring her children forth “In sorrow” (X.195). III Forced Fruitfulness and Monstrous Maternity: Sin and Scylla “Harshly pluckt” (XI.537), Eve’s children will now be torn from her in the pangs of labour. “Hope not,” Sylvester’s Christ had admonished Eve, ... thy fruit so eas’ly to bring forth As now thou slay’st it: henceforth every Birth Shall torture thee with thousand sorts of pain; Each art’rie, sinew, muscle, joynt and vein, Shall feel his part: besides foul vomitings, Prodigious longings, thoughtfull languishings, With change of colours, swouns, and many others. (Du Bartas, II.i.2.460–466)

While Sylvester insists on furnishing us with an exhaustive account of the extremity of Eve’s travail, Milton is content to suggest this aspect of forced fruitfulness


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obliquely. Although Milton’s Adam is happily ignorant of the full anguish of childbirth, rather blithely reassuring Eve that her “Pains ... in Child-bearing” will soon be “recompenc’t with joy, / Fruit of thy Womb” (XI.1052–3), Sin’s horrific account of her own terrifying and agonizing experiences of labour serves to anticipate the very real physical and emotional traumas that will attend delivery in the fallen world. It was a grim fact that, “a married and child-bearing middle- or upper-class woman residing in seventeenth-century London faced a ‘one-in-four chance of dying in childbirth’ ” (Schwartz, 1995, 85). Milton himself had had personal experience of the deadly dangers involved, since two of his three wives, Mary Powell and Katherine Woodcock, met their deaths as a result of giving birth. Milton would thus have been all too aware of the mortal fears and lethal dangers to which women were prey as part of the legacy of Eve. The physical and mental torments18 that accompany Sin’s first pregnancy and labour are conveyed through a powerfully suggestive combination of grotesquely fantastic and disturbingly realistic detail. Sin gives to Satan, who had not, of course, even realized that she was pregnant, a graphic account of the birth of their son: Pensive here I sat Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform’d. (II.777–85)

Sin attributes the horrific disfigurement she has suffered since Satan last saw her in heaven to the effects of this difficult delivery. The process of giving birth to Death had proved disastrous to the physical integrity of her body; the violent wrenching as Death “tore through” her body has permanently deformed her.19 Worse still, 18

The birth imagery is obviously designed to point towards various kinds of allegorical significance: on the one hand, Sin, as her father’s “perfect image” (II.764), mirrors the irreversible deterioration of his moral condition by her physical deformities (the process of his own outward transformation is tellingly conveyed by Zephon’s sharp response at IV. 835–41); on the other hand, since sin is its own punishment, Sin’s sufferings prefigure the “conscious terrours” (II.801) and mental torments to which the sinner will be prey after the Fall. 19 Milton’s representation of Death may owe something to Sylvester’s comparison of Chaos with an undeveloped foetus: “The shape-less burthen in the Mother’s womb / Which yet in time doth into fashion come” (Du Bartas, I.i.300–301), but Schwartz’s likening of the birth of Death to a “stillbirth,” figuring “the very real disfigurements caused by seventeenth-century surgical solutions to various forms of abnormal birth” (1993, 105), seems appropriate too.


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motherhood brings her no consolation but “sorrow infinite” (II.797). Raped by her newborn son, the exhausted mother finds herself helpless to control the brood of ... yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv’d And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me, for when they list into the womb That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth Afresh with conscious terrours vex me round, That rest or intermission none I find.20 (II.795–802)

Ovid and Milton are unusual among epic poets for the attention both give to the uniquely female experience of birth and motherhood.21 Two episodes in the Metamorphoses dwell on the pain of childbirth: Alcmena’s protracted labour when giving birth to Hercules (IX.285ff) and Myrrha’s effortful arboreal delivery of Adonis (X.503ff), but it is to the grotesque version of parturition, which transforms the beautiful virgin Scylla into a monster,22 that Milton’s reader should look for the prototype23 of Sin’s horrifyingly disfiguring metamorphosis. Milton takes particular pains to alert us to this parallel not only by distinctly Ovidian verbal echoes in his description – most obviously, his rendering of the compressed expression Cerbereos rictus (Met XIV.65) as “Cerberian mouths” (II.655) to suggest the gaping jaws of the “Hell Hounds” (II.654) that beset Sin with their ceaseless barking – but also by his open allusion to “Vex’d Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts / Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore” (II.660–661). Like Sin, Scylla is “a Woman to the waste” (II.650), but beneath feris atram canibus succingitur alvum (“her black belly is ringed about with wild dogs,” Met. XIII.732).24 20

Schwartz has argued that the behaviour of these monsters may suggest “the fevers and hemorrhaging that killed many women in the days or weeks following their giving birth (conditions that killed Mary Powell and, less directly, Katherine Woodcock),” while Death’s role in goading them on may be in part, “an allegorization of the role that fear of death played in the imaginations of women about to give birth” (1993, 105). 21 As Segal has observed, “The classical poetic tradition generally does not go into details of birth, even though it sometimes recognizes its dangers and pain, as in the Homeric Hymn to (Delian) Apollo (91–126)” (1998, 41, note 22). 22 In the Odyssey (XII), Skylla is a monster that simply exists, without any concern shown for her origins; Ovid changes the accustomed focus of the myth, turning a monster back into a maiden. 23 Though, of course, Milton makes Sin the original of Scylla rather than the other way around, and, in a variation of the “outdoing” topos, the devastation caused by Scylla is seen to pale in comparison with what will follow in the train of Sin. Though “abhorrd” (II.659) by mariners, the destruction Scylla wreaks is local and limited compared with Death, the universal force of destruction brought forth by Sin. 24 Gregerson points out that “The bodily site of Scylla’s uncanny transformation in Ovid is the alvus, a site whose coherence is rather symbolic, or phobic, than anatomical, for the term refers indifferently to the stomach, the womb, or the vulva” (208).


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Though threatened with rape, Scylla is not a rape-victim herself, but her story, one of the more grisly metamorphoses in the epic, begins and ends as a tale of unrequited desire turning to passionate rage. As Scylla swims naked in one of her favourite haunts, the sea-god Glaucus is smitten by her beauty and gives chase. Glaucus himself is double-formed – half-man half-fish, ultimaque excipiat quod tortilis inguina piscis (“his nether parts were like a fish with tail writhed round,” Met. XIII. 915; Golding XIII.1071) – his present shape being itself the product of metamorphosis.25 Glaucus attempts to stay her flight, but Scylla, unimpressed by his divine credentials and indifferent to his romantic overtures, is able to elude his pursuit by moving out of his element and escaping by land. Enraged by her rejection of him, Glaucus seeks out the sorceress Circe for help, but she in turn is overtaken with desire for him. Glaucus scorns Circe’s suit, and, spurned in turn, she takes out her venomous anger on her innocent rival. Casting a spell upon the little pool where Scylla is accustomed to bathe, Circe infects its waters portentificis ... venenis (“with unnatural poisons,” Met. XIV.55): Scylla venit mediaque tenus descenderat alvo, cum sua foedari latrantibus inguina monstris adspicit; ac primo credens non corporis illas esse sui partes, refugitque abigitque timetque ora proterva canum, sed, quos fugit, attrahit una et corpus quaerens femorum crurumque pedumque Cerbereos rictus pro partibus invenit illis statque canum rabie subiectaque terga ferarum inguinibus truncis uteroque exstante coercet. (Met. XIV.59–67) Now Scylla came; and wading to the wast, Beheld her hips with barking dogs imbrac’t. Starts backe: at first not thinking they were Part of her selfe; but rates them, and doth feare Their threatening jawes: but those, from whom she flies, She with her hales. Then looking for her thighs, Her legs, and feet; in stead of them she found The mouthes of Cerberus, inviron’d round With rav’ning Curres: the backs of salvage beasts Support her groine; whereon her belly rests. (Sandys)

Ovid represents Scylla as virtually giving birth to the monstrous dogs that protrude from her lower parts. Desperately seeking the familiar flesh of her thighs, legs and feet she finds only foreign bodies, the Cerberus-like, gaping jaws that have replaced her own body parts. The tangled syntax of the lengthy sentence above captures the pivotal moment when Scylla, still the terrified victim of these nightmarish horrors, is becoming the monster that will control them. Sin, however, remains entirely at the mercy of her multitudinous offspring who plague and torment her. 25

The mode of narration in the account of Sin and her metamorphosis is powerfully Ovidian: although Scylla herself remains silent throughout her encounter with Glaucus and its aftermath, Sin follows the latter’s example by telling the tale of her own transformation.


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Many readers have protested, and with good reason, that Sin is an innocent victim who is punished, like Medusa, for her own rape.26 But since Death is the product of Sin’s incestuous union with her own father Satan, she has undeniably played a principal role in creating the instrument of her own punishment.27 The nature of Death, the misbegotten child of this narcissistic inbreeding, is disturbingly indeterminate; ironically he is neither “shadow” nor “substance” (II.669).28 Moreover, by fathering a monstrous progeny, horrifyingly limitless in number, Death opens up the prospect of cursed rather than blessed fecundity. Susan McDonald has argued how: “By presenting images of fallen birth before those of unfallen birth, Milton challenges the reader to lay aside his or her fallen experiences in order to perceive God’s original design for human procreation.” Yet, as she acknowledges, this approach is not without its difficulties: “Fallen birth appears in vivid and graphic detail” whereas “unfallen birth must be assumed through promises and glimpsed through metaphors” (84). However, Milton implicitly contrasts Sin’s traumatic motherhood with the childbearing that could have been Eve’s: an easy and effortless birthing unclouded by fear, pain and dread.29 Following Ovid’s account of the way new life is generated after the Flood as Tellus delivers innumeras species (Met. I.436), that have been nourished in her womb, Raphael relates how, when her time was ripe, Earth, the “great Mother” (VII.281): Op’ning her fertil Woomb teem’d at a Birth Innumerous living Creatures, perfet formes, Limb’d and full grown. (VII.454–6) 26 In an otherwise suggestive and well-informed article, Mary Adams muddles her myths by claiming that it was Scylla, and not Medusa “who was punished by Athene for being raped in her temple” (175). As Leonard has pointed out, vitiasse, Ovid’s choice of verb to describe Neptune’s act against Medusa, might refer either to a seduction or a rape (115). 27 It has long been recognized that the infernal trinity of Satan, Sin and Death is rooted in the allegorical family tree to be found in the Epistle of James: “When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (1.15). 28 Because of the reflective surface of the water, Narcissus, like Eve, found only shadow where he had thought to find substance (Met. III.417). Gregerson has drawn attention to the link to be made between Narcissus’ love for his own image and the uglier side to Pygmalion’s excessive love for his own creation, made manifest through his greatgranddaughter Myrrha, who conceived a forbidden desire for her own father (205), though the fruit of that unnatural union was the handsome Adonis. The lustful and incestuous sexual union between father and daughter in Paradise Lost is a parodic inversion of the love between Father and Son in the Holy Trinity; “The entire scene is,” as Flannagan has pointed out, “a hideous parody of the immaculate begetting, and virgin birth of Christ, ‘Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born’ (Nativity Ode 3)” (404, note 204). 29 So too, Augustine was intent on stressing that the nuptial blessing was given to Adam and Eve before they sinned: ut cognosceretur procreationem filiorum ad gloriam conubii, non ad poenam pertinere peccati (“for its purpose was to make it clear that the procreation of children is a part of the glory of marriage and not of the punishment of sin”; DCD XIV.21).


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By using parturient imagery Milton introduces a female aspect into an otherwise purely masculine cosmic scene and enables “our general Mother” Eve (IV.492), the “Mother of all things living” (XI.160) and manifest “sourse of life” (XI.169), to gather to herself a constellation of images suggestive of the Father’s effortless creativity. To insist, then, without due qualification, on the Fortunate Fall and that fructuosior culpa quam innocentia (“sin is more fruitful than innocence”), to use St Ambrose’s suggestive apothegm (De Jacob I.vi.21), is not only to strive against the current of feeling evoked by the initial emphasis on “all our woe” and the “loss of Eden” (3–4), the tragic invocation to Book IX and the relentless episodes of death and disaster in Michael’s survey of the history of mankind, but also to disregard the way fruitfulness is established as the summum bonum in the prelapsarian world. Of course, this is not to deny that after the Fall the strand of optimism has its proper place in the narrative skein, but the unravelling of only one thread of meaning to the exclusion of others that lead in very different directions may result in a perverse reading of events, as in the case of Swaim, who argues that Adam and Eve’s punishment, “the sweat of the delving Adam’s brow” and the “pains of Eve’s childbearing,” make work and love “richer and more fruitful processes despite [the] apparent change for the worse, through the addition of the dimensions of pain, sorrow, and guilt” (160). IV Just as the tale of Eve’s Daphnean flight is qualified by her present bliss, so her present bliss, as an Edenic Flora, is shadowed by every reader’s experience of the fallen world. The flowers are constantly in bloom in Book IV, but every reader knows they will eventually fade. Eve, as the traditional scapegoat for the Fall, stands at the crux between life and death: she is an ambivalent mother to these flowers, and to her children, for she first gives life, but then takes it away, becoming the reason they wither and die. The pagan world was blighted by the loss of Proserpina; so too, the immediate effects of Eve’s sudden loss (IX.900) are utterly negative, resulting only in the barrenness of the “fruitless hours” (IX.1188) and death. As Adam slowly realizes, death need not be “one stroak ... / Bereaving sense” (X.809–10); life in the fallen world has become, “A long days dying to augment our paine” (X.964).30 Adam’s comprehensive summary of the extent of death’s power over Eve, “Defac’t, deflourd and now to Death devote” (IX.901),31 appears just after the garland of faded roses, the first flowers to wither in Eden, have become, in truth, a wreath for Eve: Milton makes the same point in De Doctrina Christiana I.13 where he identifies “all the labors, sorrows and disease which afflict the body” as “nothing but the prelude” to the death of the body (In corpore autem labores, ærumnæ, morbi, quid aliud sunt, nisi corporalis, quæ dicitur, mortis præludia? Col. 15.214–15). 31 This line effectively encapsulates the four degrees of death examined in detail in De Doctrina Christiana I.12 (Col. 15.202–14). 30


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From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve Down drop’d, and all the faded Roses shed. (IX.892–3)

Since this narrative sequence had opened with the most explicit expression of the underlying identification of Eve with the flowers that surround her, the roses are naturally involved in Eve’s de-flowering and spiritual death, with the emphatic plummeting of the alliterative “Down drop’d,” anticipating the heavy alliteration of line 901. The image of flowers fading has a curious resonance and reverberative power, prompting a train of associated ideas. Earlier in the poem, Milton had drawn upon the tradition that the rose which grew in Eden was “without Thorn” (IV.256); when mankind fell from grace the rose acquired the thorns of sin, keeping its beauty and fragrance as reminders of the lost paradise. The rose’s exquisite but fragile and transient beauty became proverbial in the works of classical and Christian writers alike. Associated with fleeting time, the rose was a general symbol of evanescence especially of youth, beauty and happiness. It thus became a memento mori, a reminder to those doomed to die that they should make use of the short time allotted to them, an image to give point to the carpe diem topos (literally “pluck the day”). As Ovid observes, Flora monet aetatis specie, dum floreat, uti; / contemni spinam, cum cecidere rosae (“recommends exploiting the beauty of youth, while it blooms; the thorn is despised when the rose petals have fallen,” Fasti V.353–4), while in the same vein, Comus admonishes the Lady: “If you let slip time, like a neglected rose / It withers on the stalk with languish’t head” (743–4). Though Parish directs attention to a possible link between the emotionally charged lines in which Adam and Proserpina both drop flowers, he rightly recognizes it is to Eve that Milton fittingly transposes the affective power of those celebrated lines in which Ovid captures, poignantly and unforgettably, how the loss of her flowers was one further source of grief for the childlike Proserpina: ... et, ut summa vestem laniarat ab ora, conlecti flores tunicis cecidere remissis, tantaque simplicitas puerilibus adfuit annis: haec quoque virgineum movit iactura dolorem. (Met. V.398–401) ... and as she had torn her garment from its upper edge, the flowers which she had gathered fell out of her loosened tunic;32 and such was the exceptional simplicity of her childish years, this loss too caused the maiden distress. 32

As Anderson helpfully reminds us in his note on these lines: “ripping one’s robe from the top margin is a conventional gesture of grief. Ovid had almost the same words, only a different verb, for Narcissus in 3.480,” and, he goes on to explain, as “at 393, we heard that Proserpina used the fold of her robe to hold the flowers she had picked; now, when she tears open the robe, it no longer can keep its burden, and they fall out.” The Metamorphoses is not, of course, the only other textual presence at this point; the poignancy of Proserpina’s loss is also mediated through Shakespeare’s unforgettable lines as Perdita is moved to exclaim compassionately: “O Proserpina / For the flowers now, that frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’ wagon” (The Winter’s Tale IV.iv.116–18).

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These haunting lines, which so finely intensify the pathos of loss, sharpen Eve’s lament when she discovers they are not to be allowed to remain in Eden, finding in the sentence an “unexpected stroke, worse then of Death!” (XI.268). However, Parish seems to miss the mark when he dismissively observes, “Expulsion from Paradise is certainly not a stroke worse than death, but to Eve – so like Proserpina! – it seems so” (335). He maintains that the flowers Proserpina drops are “a trivial loss by adult standards” (334). Yet Proserpina’s loss is not so very trivial after all.33 In the lines that preface her lament for the lost flowers, Proserpina calls upon her playmates and companions but most urgently of all for her mother (Met. V.396– 8).34 The sudden violence of her journey to the Underworld reflects the abruptness of these rites of passage: she must leave behind her childhood and exchange the carefree pastimes of youth for the roles of wife and queen. Arethusa’s eyewitness account of this “new” Proserpina stuns her mother and is no consolation to Ceres: “visa tua est oculis illic Proserpina nostris: illa quidem tristis neque adhuc interrita vultu, sed regina tamen, sed opaci maxima mundi, sed tamen inferni pollens matrona tyranni.” (Met. V.505–8) “I saw Proserpina there with my own eyes. She seemed sad indeed, and her face was still fearful; and yet she was a queen, and yet the empress of that world of shadows, the mighty consort of the Lord of the Underworld!”

While Arethusa concedes that Proserpina is not yet at ease with her new situation, she tries to impress upon Ceres, through the insistent repetition of sed (“and yet”), the exalted position her daughter has secured as the most powerful woman in the Underworld. Milton composes a skilful variation upon this theme of coming to terms with a violent wrenching from one sphere of life to another that is more in accord with Eve’s role as mater florum. In both his versions of Proserpina’s abduction (Fasti IV.417–618 and Met. V.346–571), Ovid insists upon Proserpina’s childlikeness. In the Fasti, Ovid notes the puellares animos (“girlish minds,” Fasti, IV.433) of Proserpina and her likeminded companions, but it is in the Metamorphoses that Ovid draws particular attention to Proserpina’s own girlish behaviour: she is not just “simple” or “naïve” (simplex, Met. V.535), but displays an “exceptional simplicity in her childish years” (tanta ... simplicitas puerilibus ... annis, Met. V.400); striving to outdo her 33 “The detail is,” as Anderson notes, “a calculated symbol for the loss of girlish pleasures and innocence.” (There is no such emotive effect in Fasti IV.448 where the girl simply tears her dress in distress.) It would seem to prefigure the loss of her virginity, just as the girdle found floating on the waters of Cyane’s pool seems to confirm it. But see Chapter 6 for further discussion of this motif. 34 In the Homeric Hymn, Proserpina calls first to Zeus her father; here and in the Fasti, the childlike Proserpina, with her strong attachment to her mother, cries out only to her for help.


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companions, Proserpina gathers flowers puellari studio (“with a girlish eagerness,” Met. V.393). Eve is not presented with the girlish simplicity of a Proserpina. Both Christopher Ricks and Fowler overlook this important dissimilarity when they claim that Eve is “carefully portrayed as ‘the gatherer and guardian of flowers’ ” (Ricks, 140, quoted in Fowler’s note to IX.901, emphasis added). The inaccuracy is significant: Eve is never seen gathering flowers. Though frequently accorded a virginal role,35 she is not assigned the maidenly, but girlish, occupation of picking flowers; she is only ever depicted in a nurturing and protective attitude towards them. The flowers, “Imborderd on each Bank,” all give evidence of the caring “hand of Eve” (IX.438). Yet it is instructive to note how ably Milton controls the perspective from which the reader views the events of the poem. By the time we read the passage containing Eve’s lament in Book XI, we are already beginning to perceive that, as for Proserpina, there is to be some compensation for the loss that has been sustained. Mary the Virgin Mother will fulfil the promise of virgin innocence and fruitful motherhood, while Eve herself will leave behind the symbolically fertile roles of mater florum and frugum genetrix to become the mother of mankind. Still, as her mournful words expressively disclose, Eve, like Proserpina, is not immediately reconciled to her new role in an unfamiliar world “Forfeit to Death” (X.304). As Linda Gregerson points out: “She was once told that she contained the future within her ... ‘the fairest of her daughters Eve’ (IV324); now she must give birth to those who will supplant her” (189). In Book IX, and by far the greater part of Book X, Milton naturally accents loss more than ultimate restoration. The optimistic counter-movement that gathers strength towards the poem’s close must not be allowed to obscure the fact that at the narrative level the poem records a seemingly irreparable loss. Ultimately, this results in an even greater celebration of the restorative power of God’s grace: with the planting of the Seed, the potentiality for fruitfulness and new life is restored.36 All the evils that followed closely in the train of Satan, Sin and Death, and were aspects of their malevolent influence – storms, winter and death itself – become subsumed into the divine rhythm of growth, whereby evil is turned to good, becoming part of the now difficult seasonal process “of pinching cold and scorching heat” (X.691) whereby flowers must give way to fruit: ... else had the Spring Perpetual smil’d on Earth with vernant flours. (X.678–9)

Following the premature end of the earthly Paradise, lost flowers eloquently testify to the irremediable residue of suffering now inherent in the very nature of 35

For further speculation on the significance of this aspect of Eve’s portrayal, see Chapter 6. 36 “Birth” is of central importance to Milton’s purpose here, since, as Schwartz maintains, it will become not only “the transmitter of sin to later generations,” but also “the mechanism by which that sin will be reversed” (1993, 105).


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things. Though the poem certainly holds out the hope that death may paradoxically become the door to life, the image of the faded roses is a powerful reminder that life and death are now enmeshed, and the lost flowers of Eden become a focus for the nostalgia for all that was lost with Eve and the Fall.37

37

Mother Earth is personified during the fall of Eve and feels acutely her loss: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature / Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost” (IX.783–5, emphasis added). The emphasis here is nevertheless surprising, suggesting that the Fall is Eve’s rather than Adam’s, or is the Fall of both of them together.

Chapter 4

“Goddess Humane”: Eve as Venus, Queen of the Graces Milton’s attitude to beauty is fruitfully complex, acknowledging both its autonomous power and its divine provenance, its capacity to mislead as well as to draw the admirer to its creator. Milton’s Eve incarnates this ambiguous power. In presenting Eve’s beauty, Milton accordingly shifts her mythic identification: springtime and the flowers that cluster around Eve through her alignment with Flora and Proserpina are subsumed within a more exalted configuration as, with a further adjustment of focus, she assumes the role of the graceful goddess of beauty and love, Venus herself. Milton carefully emphasizes Eve’s beauty as a quality that distinguishes her from Adam. Jewish tradition, by contrast, though conceding Eve’s “surprising beauty and grace” had insisted that her relative inferiority to her husband extended to her physical appearance as well: she “was but as an ape compared with Adam” (Ginzberg, I.68, 60). In his translation of Du Bartas, it is the likeness between the first two human beings that is stressed by Sylvester: Eve has “All Adam’s beauties” (I.vi.1045), and except that her features are appropriately softer and more feminine than his, she was scarcely to be distinguished from him, “hardly, one / Could have ... known the Bridegroom from his gentle Bride” (I.vi.1045–7). In Paradise Lost, beauty is Eve’s especial attribute. Indeed, in acknowledgement of this, her Maker, in the very first words spoken to Eve after her creation, addresses her as “fair Creature” (IV.468), while conversely, her first impression of Adam is that he is “less faire” than herself (IV.478). Her beauty is, however, handled with calculated ambiguity by Milton. It becomes the single most significant factor that complicates a just appraisal of Eve and her position in the divine economy before the Fall, and, as such, its implications merit careful consideration. I In his physical realization of Eve, Milton’s primary concern was evidently to create the ideal woman; Dudley Hutcherson’s is one voice among many that have acclaimed the “unequalled” success with which Milton has endowed his Eve with “a rare physical beauty clothed in great poetry” (1960, 15). Milton’s visualizing technique, in which he avoids overly particularized physical detail that Held remarked on the close identification of Flora with Venus (203, 206). As Kilgour has perceptively noted, “In Ovid, she [Flora] appears as a kind of lower class version of the goddess” (12, note 21).


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might interfere with a reader’s prior conception of “perfet beauty” (IV.634), has generally found favour among critics. Robert Thyer observed that while “Most great poets have labour’d in a particular Manner the Delineation of their Beauties (Ariosto’s Alcina, Tasso’s Armida, Spenser’s Belphoebe),” Milton has not supplied an inventory of her best features, but instead “has very artfully mentioned the Charms of [Eve’s] Person in general Terms only” (note to IV.304 in the 1751 ed.). Although there is a clear symbolic significance attached to this descriptive technique – what immediately impresses itself upon the observer is the superior height and the upright posture of the first human beings compared with the animals that surround them – Milton does not rely exclusively on a set of conceptual images in his rendering of their physical appearance. One of the most striking exceptions is surely the attention paid to every aspect of Eve’s hair – its length, colour and arrangement. “Eve is all of ivory and gold” was the impression that she left upon William Hazlitt (105), and certainly her “golden tresses” (IV.305) have reminded more than one reader of χρυσέη Αφροδίτη / Venus aurea (Met. X.277), the goddess of love in the Graeco-Roman pantheon. Once again, Milton’s representation of Eve may call to mind the work of Botticelli. As in his famous celebration of beauty, The Birth of Venus, Eve’s physical magnificence is summed up in the beauty of the “flowing Gold” (IV.496) of her hair. Neither tightly bound nor neatly groomed, Eve’s hair is at its most alluring when luxuriating in its own looseness or waving with its own natural grace: Shee as a vail down to the slender waste Her unadorned golden tresses wore Dissheveld, but in wanton ringlets wav’d. (IV.304–6)

With the exception of her hair, Milton does not attempt to convey a minutely detailed description of Eve’s beauty, preferring instead to suggest its presence obliquely either by comparing it with some ideal form of beauty, such as that of Narcissus, Daphne, Proserpina, Ceres, Flora or even Venus herself, or by describing the reaction that her beauty excites in the beholder. A powerful example

See Chapter 5 for further discussion of the wider implications of physical posture. Roland Mushat Frye has observed how Eve is often associated with Venus in Christian iconography: “This conflation of images was not uncommon, but is epitomized in the paintings of Cranach, where the figures of Venus and of Eve often seem virtually indistinguishable” (276). The link between Venus and Eve is reinforced through the repeated association of Eve with the rose and myrtle, the two plants singled out by Ovid and other classical poets as especially sacred to the goddess and used, as Ovid explains, in the rituals connected with her festival in April, the spring month dedicated to her worship: formosa Venus formoso tempore digna est (“fair Venus deserves the fair season,” Fasti IV.129). Roland Mushat Frye cites this as “another example of [Milton’s] insistence upon the native freedom and luxuriance of the garden, where ‘not nice art’ prevailed” (274).

“Goddess Humane”

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of the effect of Eve’s pre-eminent beauty is to be found early in Book V, when Adam wakes and is surprised to discover Eve still asleep beside him: ... he on his side Leaning half-rais’d, with looks of cordial Love Hung over her enamour’d, and beheld Beautie, which whether waking or asleep, Shot forth peculiar Graces. (V.11–15)

The narrator’s emphatic placing of “Beautie” at the head of line 14 and the omission of the possessive adjective “her” makes Eve the epiphany of Beauty itself. “Celestial Beautie” (IX.540) thus becomes incarnate, not thinly personified, but substantially embodied, in Eve. Before the Fall, the reader is never far from such reminders of the magnetism and thrilling potency of her beauty. There is Adam’s impressive homage to Eve as the consummation of creation, “so lovly faire, / That what seemd fair in all the World, seemed now / Mean, or in her summd up, in her containd” (VIII. 471–73); and there is Satan’s sincere testimony too. In his estimation she is not just “fair,” but ... divinely fair, fit Love for Gods, Not terrible, though terrour be in Love And beautie. (IX.489–91)

The Fallen Angel’s response is honest and unguarded here; it is not rendered suspect as specious “overpraising” (IX.615) calculated to charm and flatter Eve. II Eve is explicitly compared with the goddess of beauty and love in two passages that frame her encounter with the couple’s heavenly guest Raphael. The first serves to establish the superlative nature of her loveliness: it is Eve who holds the gift of love in her power as she is presented to us: Undeckt, save with her self more lovely fair Then Wood-Nymph, or the fairest Goddess feign’d Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove. (V.381–3)

The scene is eroticized through an Ovidian lens as the reader is suddenly projected into a fabled world and encouraged momentarily to glimpse a tableau of the Judgement of Paris as so often depicted by Ovid. Eve now takes centre

Though these graces are peculiar to Eve, Satan recognizes that Adam too has his share of the grace that “The hand that formed them on thir shape hath pourd” (IV.365).


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stage flanked by two rivals (the “Wood-Nymph” Pomona and Venus herself in Milton’s revision of the famous scene), while Raphael imperceptibly merges into the figure of Mercury, the winged messenger (nuntius ales, Her. XVI.68). This transformation has been adroitly prepared for a few lines previously when the narrator had described how “Like Maia’s son [Mercury] he stood, / And shook his Plumes” (V.285–6). With the narrator, the reader has been assigned the task of arbiter formae, judge of this beauty contest, who must pronounce which beauty deserves to beat the other two: vincere quae forma digna sit una duas! (Her. XVI.70). Though all three contestants seem fair, Eve is fairer, and the reader is compelled to overturn Paris’ judgement, vincis utramque, Venus (“Venus, you beat both the other two,” Ars Am. I.248) – who is now only “feign’d” to be the “fairest” – in favour of Eve. It hardly seems coincidental that Ovid’s purpose for including the Judgement of Paris as a mythological exemplum at this point in the Ars Amatoria is to warn his pupils that a girl’s looks can only be properly judged in full daylight. The conditions chosen for the celebrated contest – specifically the testing quality of the searching sunlight – would expose any blemishes on the undraped figures: Luce deas caeloque Paris spectavit aperto, Cum dixit Veneri “vincis utramque, Venus.” (Ars Am. I.247–8) It was in the open air, in full daylight that Paris beheld the goddesses, when he said to Venus, “You beat both the other two, Venus.”

So too it is in the light of the midday sun, as Eve stands fully naked, ready to welcome her angelic visitor outside her “Silvan Lodge” (V.377), that the dazzling splendour of her radiant and flawless beauty confirms her right to the title of “fairest.”10 Ovid refers to Pomona by the Greek term hamadryas (Met. XIV.624); such nymphs were generally associated with woods rather than gardens. (More detailed discussion of Eve’s association with Pomona is to be found in Chapters 5 and 6.) In another of his versions of the Judgement, Ovid had remarked how: Utraque formosae Paridi potuere videri, / Sed sibi conlatam vicit utramque Venus (“Both rivals might have seemed fair to Paris, but Venus beat both rivals, once they were compared to her,” Rem. Am. 711–12). For Gregerson, this deliberate allusion to the Judgement inevitably “bears a cautionary inscription: Venus’ prize for being judged fairest on Mount Ida was the apple of discord, her legacy to the city of Troy as Eve’s apple will be her legacy to humankind” (194). Guillory has drawn attention to the way, “the foregrounding of Eve’s nudity occults Adam’s” (208). 10 Indeed both Satan (IX.538) and Adam (IX.896) address Eve by the superlative form, “fairest,” whereas Adam, the first man, is but “fair” (VIII.221). The narrator too pronounces Eve to be “the fairest of her Daughters” (IV.324), possessing a beauty that could never be matched – not even with all the resources of the cosmetic arts.


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However, it is instructive to pause and reflect upon the unique nature of Eve’s nakedness here that is brought out by a suggestive extension of the comparison between the two female forms. Eve, as yet, has no knowledge of her nakedness, no understanding of any need for clothing, and thus no sense of lack without it. So, whereas Milton’s Eve is at ease, unselfconscious and entirely unabashed by her nakedness, without her clothes, even the lovely goddess of beauty instinctively adopts her characteristic pose as Venus Pudica, as Ovid later points out: Ipsa Venus pubem, quotiens velamina ponit, Protegitur laeva semireducta manu. (Ars Am. II.613–14) Venus herself, as often as she puts aside her garments, half turned away, shields her private parts with her left hand.

So too, although the Hour is poised ready to spread a mantle about the goddess’ naked form as soon as she reaches the earth, even Botticelli’s heavenly Venus covers herself by holding the end of her long, loosely bound hair before her pudenda in a similar gesture of concealment.11 Eve also wears her hair “as a vail” (IV.304), and the famous lines from St Paul, “But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her as a covering” (1 Cor. XI.15), are often cited to gloss this reference. But although Eve’s hair is longer than Adam’s, her hair only reaches to her “slender waste” (IV.304) and so reveals rather more than it conceals. Milton’s Eve is more at ease in her naked flesh than the pagan goddess Venus: she is not merely unashamed of her nakedness, but blissfully and properly unaware of it. In accordance with the scriptural reference, “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Gen. II.25), Adam and Eve had, of course, always been shown in the nude before the Fall, but, unsurprisingly, in literature as well as art, “full frontals” were rarely in evidence before the Renaissance.12 Whereas in the visual arts strategies for concealing their genitals were in widespread use – Eve’s might be veiled by her long hair and Adam’s hidden from view by a leafy bough conveniently placed13 – Sylvester’s account simply omits any mention of their genitalia despite giving a minutely detailed inventory of their physical attributes (inside as well as out, down to “The Sinews, Gristles and Bones” I.vi.512–735). Milton emphatically repudiates such instances 11 So too in the cover-illustration, Botticelli’s “Venus Pudica,” covers herself with her hair. (The way her hair is coiled at the end in a pronounced serpentine twist has prompted speculation that the painting was intended as a representation of Eve rather than Venus.) 12 Roland Mushat Frye remarks how with “The repudiation of asceticism ... [i]n the Renaissance, the nudity of Adam and Eve” took on “a new explicitness, an affirmative joy” (263). 13 In John Baptista de Medina’s illustration to Book V, Adam is shown fully naked though Eve’s hair is longer than waist length and screens her genitalia, but in the illustration to Book VII Adam is carefully posed in profile and Eve adopts the pose of Venus pudica.

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of postlapsarian prudery, outspoken in his insistence that “guiltie shame” is “Sinbred” (IV.313, 315) and a direct consequence of the Fall. He maintains, with an uncompromising explicitness, that those “mysterious parts” (IV.312) were not then hidden from sight and repeatedly insists that the reader takes cognizance of Adam and Eve’s naked forms and their inherent purity and “spotless innocence” (IV.318). The second occasion on which Eve overtly assumes the role of Venus is when she leaves the discussion between Raphael and Adam to visit her garden. At first the narrator comments in a relatively colourless and matter-of-fact manner that Eve rose from her seat with “Grace that won who saw to wish her stay” (VIII.44), but her actual departure a few lines later is attended by a striking extension of this idea that attracts considerable narrative emphasis as With Goddess-like demeanour forth she went; Not unattended, for on her as Queen A pomp of winning Graces waited still, And from about her shot Darts of desire Into all Eyes to wish her still in sight. (VIII.60–64)

At this point, “She is,” as Newton remarked, “not only graceful, But queen of the graces as the Heathens supposed their Goddess of love to be” (Note to VIII.40). The Graces, “daughters of delight” and “Handmaides of Venus” (FQ VI.x.15.1–2), regularly constituted the especial retinue of the goddess of love, ready to attend and “Her to adorne, when so she forth doth wend” (FQ VI.x.21.8).14 Milton does not invite us to visualize the Graces, but since they too are traditionally portrayed as unclothed to symbolize their openness and lack of deception: “that without guile / Or false dissemblaunce all them plaine may see, / Simple and true from couert malice free” (FQ VI.x.24.3–5), they seem appropriate attendants to accompany the naked Eve in all her innocent virtue.15 Given that when Adam sets out to meet their heavenly visitor, his entourage is conspicuous by its absence – the narrative voice assures us that his naked majesty has more natural dignity and solemnity than the “tedious pomp that waits / on Princes” (V.354–55) – the regal and ceremonious attendance accorded Eve is especially curious. What is more surprising is that, unlike Milton’s accustomed handling of mythological material in his epic similes, where the two worlds of Graeco-Roman myth and Scripture remain distinct and separate, here the barrier between the two worlds has become permeable and the Graces have crossed over 14 Forsyth has shown how the Homeric formula “not alone” when applied to female figures is used to signify their chastity, status and dignity (138–9). 15 Such an emphasis accords well with Panofsky’s observation that in the Renaissance nakedness, “especially when contrasted with its opposite, came to be understood as a symbol of truth in a general philosophical sense” (159). Thus in Titian’s famous masterpiece, known as Sacred and Profane Love, Heavenly Love is portrayed naked, whereas Earthly Love is demurely dressed.


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and stepped into the garden.16 That this effect is not altogether attributable to an accidental slippage in the syntax seems confirmed by their other appearance in Eden when, with Universal Pan, “the Graces and the Hours in dance / Led on th’ Eternal Spring” (IV.267–8). Once again the reader is confronted by a bold conflation of the two worlds and the remarkable lack of any ontological disparity between them. These deities are evidently not to be conceived as simply lifeless personifications introduced for decorative effect; they are living presences who infuse the garden with their tutelary power. Moreover, as Neil Forsyth has remarked, unlike the other classical allusions to mythical gardens that directly follow (“Not that faire field / Of Enna ...,” IV.268ff), “the presence of the Graces is not negated or even qualified ... they are simply present in the garden” (147) with Eve. The transplantation of this pagan topos is accomplished so casually and discreetly that one may almost read passed it without registering what Milton has done here. Just as in her naked glory Milton’s Eve is seen to be more assured than the goddess of beauty herself, so here we see her appropriation of the Graces who have become her own attendants in Paradise. In this way, Eve subsumes another aspect of Venus’ divinity, for as goddess of love she is also the mother of human society. III According to Ovid, it is to Venus that we owe the foundations of human society: prima feros habitus homini detraxit: ab illa venerunt cultus mundaque cura sui. (Fasti IV.107–8)17 Venus was the first to draw man away from his savage habits; from her came culture and a concern for elegance.

Her gifts, which are at the basis of civilized life, are distributed through the agency of her attendant Graces.18 Spenser offers a helpfully detailed gloss on this refining process: 16

Forsyth helpfully details how Milton has departed from epic convention here. If this were a typical epic simile, Forsyth explains, “then the Queen and her Graces would be enclosed within the ring-form (‘as ... so ...’) construction, juxtaposed but not merged with the narrative context,” but since, “ ‘as’ governs only the word ‘Queen,’ ” the Graces have “slipped outside the simile and attached themselves to Eve” (144). 17 See too, Ars Am. II.473–4, 477. Ovid was not, of course, the first Roman poet to attribute the origins of human civilization to the influence of Venus; in a famous passage Lucretius explains how the beginnings of human society stem from the time when Venus imminuit viris (“Venus subdued brute strength,” De Rer. Nat. V.1017). Milton celebrates marriage as the foundation of human society in the epithalamium (IV.750–757). 18 Spenser describes the close association between Venus and the Graces, but offers a slightly different perspective on their relationship. Though in this configuration Venus may unite in herself their qualities, these are represented as originating in the Graces themselves: the Graces “to men all gifts of grace do graunt, / And all, that Venus in her selfe doth vaunt, / Is borrowed of them” (FQ VI.x.15.4–6).

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve These three on men all gracious gifts bestow, Which decke the body or adorne the mynde, To make them louely or well favoured show, As comely carriage, entertainment kynde, Sweete semblaunt, friendly offices that bynde, And all the complements of curtesie: They teach vs, how to each degree and kynde We should our selves demeane, to low, to hie; To friends, to foes, which skill men call Ciuility. (FQ VI.x.23.1–9)

“Ciuility,” is the quality that separates man’s life from that of beasts, and it is Venus, in whom multaque cum forma gratia mixta fuit (“many a grace was blended with beauty,” Ars Am. II.570), who is the source of this transformative power. In Paradise Lost it is Eve who exerts this influence: Adam himself confides in Raphael how, “her looks ... infus’d / Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before” (VIII.474–75), and rejoices in ... those graceful acts, Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions mixt with Love And sweet compliance.19 (VIII.600–603)

Typically, Sylvester gives an overstated version of this idea of Eve’s “civilizing” influence upon Adam. Sylvester argues that in an Eden without Eve ... Man were but half a man, But a wilde Wolfe, but a Barbarian. Brute, ragefull, fierce, moody, melancholike, ... whom nought but naught could like; Born solely for himselfe, bereft of sense, Of heart, of love, of life, of excellence. (Du Bartas, I.vi.1018–23)

When Eve disappears from view, it is the yearning for her continued presence by those who follow her departure with their eyes, which is the point of emphasis: the “Pomp of winning Graces” from about her shot Darts of desire Into all Eyes to wish her still in sight. (VIII.61–63)

In a justly famous passage of close reading, Ricks demonstrated how Milton’s brilliantly controlled use of enjambment, combined with a certain ambivalence in the syntax, is deployed here to give a deliberately disquieting effect: “At first, desire seems absolute,” and the reader inevitably prepares to linger over “desire” 19 Similarly, Ross had identified the Graces as symbolizing “the three companions of true love ... 1. good wil or benevolence 2. concord or consent of minds, idem velle et idem nolle; 3. bountie or beneficence” (350).


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as if the line were end-stopped, but, after a moment of apparent closure, the unexpected appearance of the prepositional phrase “Into all Eyes,” at the head of the line that follows, checks this instinctive response, revealing the sense to be as yet incomplete. The reader’s suspense is further prolonged by this “delaying phrase ... after which, and only after which, is the desire defined as still innocent ‘to wish her still in sight’ ” (98). If the protraction of these lines is compared with the directness and economy of the earlier line, “Grace that won who saw to wish her stay,” not only does the tautology of “desire ... to wish” become more clearly marked, but it also becomes possible to appreciate more fully the way the narrative voice has teased the reader in a calculated manner by momentarily offering “the sexual meaning of ‘desire’ only to retract” it again (Forsyth, 150). These “Darts of desire”20 do not provoke the tormenting, “fierce desire” (IV.509) that inflames the Fallen Angel when he sees the naked couple “Imparadis’t in one anothers arms” (IV.506), nor the “Carnal desire” (IX.1013) that overtakes the fallen couple after they have eaten the apple; instead we are confronted with the simple fact that to see Eve is to desire to keep her continually in sight.21 The only other two occasions when the couple are separated before the Fall elicit a similar reaction from Adam: we can look back to his dismay at the sudden disappearance of the newly created Eve (VIII.478–80), and forward to the “long ... ardent look” (IX.397) with which he will pursue her retreating form as she leaves him to garden alone on the fateful morning of the Fall. However, the narrator emphatically asserts that the affective power of Eve’s beauty is not limited to its effect upon Adam alone, but exists independently of him: the desire to keep “her still in sight” would affect whoever saw her. It is, as Karen Edwards has justly observed, “a claim which the unqualified ‘all Eyes’ constitutes as an ‘objective’ truth, a truth universally acknowledged” (243), and seems of especial weight when set in a context in which Milton’s entire readership is addressed by the narrator (“O when meet now / Such pairs, in Love and mutual Honour joyn’d”? VIII.57–8). Such a rapturous response on the narrator’s part would appear to provide evident “authorial endorsement of Adam’s enthusiasm for Eve.”22 But perhaps the most powerful testimony to Eve’s beauty as an independent and active force at work within the garden is the unexpected impact “her Heav’nly forme / Angelic” (IX.457–8) has upon Satan. The affective power of her beauty to promote good is unequivocally demonstrated by the way “with rapine sweet” she “bereav’d” 20 Forsyth has pointed out how: “The conventional activity of Cupid has been superimposed on the image of the Graces, further blurring the syntax and the picture but intensifying the sexual implications” (149). 21 Milton is careful to concentrate upon the pleasure in the act of looking (scopophilia); Eve’s beauty is presented here neither as an erotic spectacle nor as the object of a voyeuristic gaze. 22 See Lindenbaum (290); Hazlitt went so far as to conclude that Eve is “the idol of the poet’s imagination” (105).


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His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought: That space the Evil one abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remaind Stupidly good, of enmity disarm’d, Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge. (IX.462–6)

With such passages in view, it is hardly surprising if Eve’s beauty no longer seems merely a matter of “outward ornament” (SA 1025). They certainly reveal a more complex attitude to beauty than those who assume that Milton’s own considered judgement was neatly contained in Raphael’s dismissive comments on Eve’s fair outside (VIII.568) or Satan’s later rejection of beauty as a “trivial toy” that “stands / In the admiration only of weak minds” (PR II.223, 220–221). At times the viewpoint certainly seems closer to the exalted conception of beauty held by the Renaissance Neoplatonists, and indeed, the significance of Eve’s beauty and her association with the Graces is seen to be magnified when regarded through the lens of Renaissance Neoplatonism.23 IV Milton’s early interest in Platonism is well documented. In a letter to his dear friend Charles Diodati, Milton had confided in him his preoccupation with the “idea of the beautiful” and his quest to uncover those “sure traces” of the divine to be found in earthly existence: Nec tanto Ceres labore, ut in Fabulis est, Liberam fertur quæsivisse filiam, quanto ego hanc του χαλου ιδεαν, veluti pulcherrimam quandam imaginem, per omnes rerum formas & facies: (πολλαι γαρ μορφαι των Δαιμονιων) dies noctesque indagare soleo, & quasi certis quibusdam vestigiis ducentem sector. (FE Epist. 7, Col. 12.26) Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina as it is my habit day and night to seek for this “idea of the beautiful” as for a certain supremely beautiful image, through all the forms and faces of things (“for many are the shapes of things divine”), and I follow after it as it leads me on as by some sure traces.

In keeping with Plato’s influential definition of Love as “Desire aroused by Beauty” (Symposium, 201), adopted by the Neoplatonists,24 Spenser had reflected 23

In a short but suggestive article, “Milton’s Eve and the Neoplatonic Graces” (1967), Boyette has drawn heavily on Wind’s reading of the Neoplatonic dynamics of the visual imagery in Botticelli’s Primavera to illuminate the significance of Eve’s role in Eden; I too am indebted to Wind’s scholarly and engaging study. 24 In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, Ficino, the head of the Platonic Academy in Renaissance Florence, had explained that: Cum amorem dicimus, pulchritudinis desiderium intelligite. (“When we say love, understand the desire for beauty,” De Amore I.iv).


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upon the origin of mankind’s attraction to beauty and concluded that, even in his fallen condition, “in choice of loue” man ... doth desyre That seemes on earth most heauenly to embrace, That same is Beautie, borne of heauenly race. For sure of all, that in this mortall frame Contained is, nought more diuine doth seeme, Or that resembleth more th’ immortall flame Of heauenly light, then Beauties glorious beame. (An Hymne in Honour of Love, 110–16)

From this perspective, beauty is “the mirrour ... of heauenly light” (196), the divine made manifest in Eve. With this Neoplatonic inflection, Eve’s beauty and her alignment with Venus – unde movetur amor (“from whence love is stirred,” Her. XVI.78) – assume a more profound significance and become a vital link in the chain which unites Adam with God. This is sanctioned by Raphael’s acknowledgement of the crucial role Adam’s relationship with Eve is to play in the divine scheme: human love “Leads up to Heav’n, is both the way and the guide” (VIII.612–13). However, according to Renaissance Neoplatonism, earthly love was of two kinds because the desire aroused by earthly beauty was itself of two opposite kinds, l’uno è bestiale e l’altro è umano (“the one from animal lust, the other from human love,” Commento II.24). Thus the two types of love that had been symbolized in Plato by Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos (Symposium, 180D–E) were elaborated by Pico della Mirandola into a threefold division: Amore celeste, umano e bestiale (“heavenly, human and bestial love,” Commento II.24). Accordingly, heavenly and earthly love were no longer to be conceived as being in simple opposition: human love was instead a type or shadow of heavenly love, the latter a fulfilment or completion of the former. Implicit in Raphael’s discourse on the nature of love in Book VIII is the Neoplatonic hierarchy of love and its triadic division as Fowler and others have noted.25 Raphael differentiates earthly from heavenly love, but acknowledges its role as a means to that end, while Adam defends the mystery of human love as different in kind from the act of copulation “common to all kindes” (VIII.597). Raphael positions earthly love on the ladder leading up to heavenly love, but down to animal lust, thus assigning human love the same pivotal position in the divine scheme as the Neoplatonists.26 Raphael expounds to Adam how “true Love”

25

Fowler, note to VIII.589–94; Flannagan, note 174, 579. As in Raphael’s image of a plant growing towards the sun (V.479–82), the natural movement is upwards towards God, but it is not an irresistible movement: after the Fall, Adam slips down the scala amoris as love for Eve degenerates into lust. 26


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... refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale By which to heav’nly Love thou maist ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause Among the Beasts no Mate for thee was found. (VIII.589–94)

Human love is thus not an end in itself: the beloved’s beauty should lead the lover’s thoughts from earth to heaven. Adam demonstrates that he has absorbed Raphael’s lesson when he volunteers that: “In contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (V.511–12). Indeed, it is possible to distinguish some similarities here with the divine cycle fundamental to Neoplatonic thought in which God exerts his influence on the world in a tripartite rhythm. Ficino helpfully glosses this cyclical movement in an oft-quoted passage from his commentary on Plato’s Symposium: Circulus ... prout in Deo incipit et allicit, pulchritudo: prout in mundum transiens ipsum rapit, amor; prout in auctorem remeans ipsi suum opus coniungit, voluptas. Amor igitur in voluptatem a pulchritudine desinit. (De Amore II.ii) This circle ... inasmuch as it begins in God and attracts to Him, is beauty; inasmuch as, passing over into the world, it captivates the world, it is love; inasmuch as returning to its source it joins His work to Him, it is called rapture. Love, therefore, begins in beauty and ends in rapture.

Love is the mediating power that translates beauty into rapturous delight and enables man to ascend towards God: Eve is thus a manifestation of the infinite bounty of divine Love from which everything originates and is an expression of the harmonious bond that draws the human back to the divine.27 In desiring her, Adam comes closer to God. It is notable that Milton’s Adam does not regularly enjoy the company of God or the angels – Raphael’s visit is a welcome diversion – so his knowledge of God must mainly come through His creation: the garden, himself, and, most strikingly, Eve, in whom all this is: “summd up” and “contained” (VIII.473). Eve’s beauty, far from being merely the means to arouse Adam to propagate mankind or an optional extra to “delight” him “more” (VIII.576), is earnest of God’s essential goodness. Eve, in an unexpected and inexplicit way, is Adam’s daily way of knowing God. She comes from God and she draws Adam back to God through desire. Milton’s iconic description of Eve as “Queen of the Graces” reinforces this mystical circulation. In the philosophical mythology of Neoplatonic thought, the classical grouping of the Graces, bound together in an unbroken circle of grace, giving – accepting – returning (Seneca, De Beneficiis, I.iii), became an inclusive

27

See Boyette (1967, 19–30).


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symbol of this rhythm of love in which, as Pulchritudo – Amor – Voluptas,28 the “unity of Venus” was “unfolded.”29 The accustomed grouping of the Graces, in which they are pictured asymmetrically, one with her head turned to the side, while the other two are shown looking back towards us (una aversa pingitur, duae nos respicientes; Servius, In Vergilii Aeneidum I.720), acquired a transcendent meaning, representing iconographically the Neoplatonic metaphysic of Love. As Wind explains, “the first benefit (Pulchritudo) descends from the Beyond to us, and ... the enraptured Grace (Amor) ‘turns back’ from us to the Beyond (Voluptas)” (46). Given that Pico della Mirandola had used the imagery of a flaming passion to describe the violentia dello amor celeste (Commento III.2), and that for Plotinus too the supreme joys of heavenly love were adumbrated by the delights of earthly love (Enneads VI.ix.9), we may appreciate more fully the exalted function that seems to be accorded human love in Milton’s Paradise. Love is pre-eminent among the delights of Eden as Milton repeatedly emphasizes. The paradisum voluptatis is found to be incomplete without Eve, and for Adam to be with Eve is “the sum of earthly bliss” (VIII.522).30 This view seems to be given countenance by Raphael, who, having explained how flesh and spirit are placed upon the same continuum so that flesh may be refined into spirit, intimates that the joys of heaven are those of Paradise repeated in a ‘finer tone’. Pressed on this point by an eagerly curious Adam, Raphael concedes that heavenly spirits too express their love in sexual union and suggests the bliss of such heavenly love-making by emphasizing the complete interpenetration of angelic intercourse. Just as for Adam, Eden is no paradise without Eve, Raphael admits that there would be no happiness in heaven without such transcendent sexual love: ... Let it suffice thee that thou know’st Us happie, and without Love no happiness. Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy In eminence, and obstacle find none Of membrane, joynt, or limb, exclusive barrs: Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring. (VIII.620–628)

As Wind points out, Pulchritudo – Amor – Voluptas formed the inscription around a depiction of the Graces on a commemorative medal cast for Pico (43). 29 Pico, Conclusiones ... de modo intelligendi hymnos Orphei, no. 8 (as quoted in Wind, 36). 30 Lindenbaum considers we have very good cause to consider both that “Milton himself viewed [“the gift of prelapsarian love”] as the crown of Eden’s blessings and that he wanted us to think so too” (283). 28


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The metaphysical implications of sexual love apparent here are clearly at odds with the views on sex to be found elsewhere in Milton’s writing. The reader familiar with the divorce tracts cannot help but recall the persistent denigration of sex as essentially animalistic, “the sting of a bruit desire” (DDD II.19; Col. 3.492), so much in evidence there and wonder at the change. The divorce tracts are, of course, at a distance from the composition of Paradise Lost both emotionally and temporally, but even in these works, Milton’s disgust is not directed at the mechanics of sex per se but at the act of intercourse as a merely sexual coupling in isolation from a context of mental and spiritual union and abstracted from the “amiable and attractive society of conjugal love” (Colasterion; Col. 4.i.254). Milton’s lofty idealism provokes feelings of utter contempt for those who reduce the significance of marriage to the satisfaction of sexual desire, “the meer motion of carnall lust ... the meer goad of a sensitive desire,” and the note of derision is distinctly audible in the scornful sting to the tail of the sentence: “God does not principally take care for such cattell” (DDD I.4; Col. 3.ii.396). Milton intimates that if love does not animate the physical act of union, a couple “instead of being one flesh ... will be rather two carkasses chain’d unnaturally together; or as it may happ’n, a living soule bound to a dead corps” (DDD II.16; Col. 3.ii.478) and, he asserts elsewhere in words that seem to carry the weight of personal conviction, “the deed of procreation ... of it self soon cloies, and is despis’d, unless it bee cherisht and re-incited with a pleasing conversation” (Colasterion; Col. 4.254).31 In his eloquent and spirited defence of the uniquely human experience of married love, Adam distinguishes its mysteries from the act of “procreation common to all kindes” and delights in the “unfeign’d / Union of Mind” (VIII.597; 603–4) he shares with Eve. V Pressed to a natural conclusion, the line of argument evolving in the preceding section would lead to the conviction that Eve is “the link between Adam and beatitude: the love she inspires an invitation to learn what man can know of God” (Boyette, 341). However, such a view clearly runs contrary to Milton’s famous statement of the relationship of the sexes to God, and to each other: “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (IV.299). In the more familiar view of Milton’s theological scheme, “the relations of the two to Deity are through the superior of 31

Just as the masculinist assumptions of Neoplatonic love – that the lady’s beauty leads the male lover’s thoughts from earth to heaven – are markedly present throughout Raphael and Adam’s disquisition on love, so too, in the divorce tracts, Milton was writing primarily from a masculine perspective to a male readership. This becomes transparently obvious in his vivid evocation of the loathsome servitude that plagues a marriage lacking the delights of compatibility where the reader is encouraged to sympathize with the male partner condemned “to grind in the mill of an undelighted and servil copulation” (DDD I.6; Col. 3.ii.403).


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the two, the man” (Fletcher, 139); it is Adam who is “the medium by which Eve is divinely created and through which she unites with God” (Lieb, 149). Adam is nearer to God’s image while Eve, being but “a copy of a copy” (Watkins, 137), “In outward” resembles “less / His Image who made both,” as Adam himself recognizes (VIII.543–4). In this configuration, because Adam’s likeness is above Eve’s on the scale of being, in “Loving Adam, she loves upward toward the deity,” whereas “he in loving her loves a likeness less perfect” (Gregerson, 171, 193).32 Drawing on the authority of St Paul, Milton had elaborated this point elsewhere in Tetrachordon. Commenting on the crucial verse from Genesis, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (I.27), Milton had expounded its significance thus: ... had the Image of God bin equally common to them both [i.e. to woman as well as to man], it had no doubt bin said, In the image of God created he them. But St Paul ends the controversie by explaining that the woman is not primarily and immediatly the image of God, but in reference to the man. The head of the woman, saith he, I Cor. II. is the man: he the image and glory of God, she the glory of the man: he not for her but she for him. (Col. 4.76)

The balanced rhythm and wording of the final line seem especially telling, and encourage a reading of the passage as a gloss upon the equivalent line from the epic (IV.299). The couple’s first lesson in Eden apparently illuminates this hierarchy of value in which feminine “beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom” (IV.490–491).33 Accordingly, if “the mind / And inward Faculties ... most excell” then it follows, Adam reasons, that Eve is “inferiour” to him “in the prime end / Of Nature” (VIII.540–542). Nevertheless Adam himself finds it difficult to sustain this assessment of their relative importance in the divine scheme, as we have seen. For although Adam more directly resembles God’s image, yet, of the two, Eve is indisputably the “Fairest resemblance of [their] Maker faire” (IX.538, emphasis added). Adam clearly finds the implications of her superior beauty unsettling; it seems excessive to him. “Too much of Ornament” (VIII.538) has been bestowed upon her, making him feel inadequate as a consequence. Indeed, in Adam’s eyes, Eve is … so lovly faire, That what seemd fair in all the World, seemed now Mean, or in her summd up, in her containd. (VIII.471–3)

32 Schoenfeldt has similarly noted an underlying tension which gives expression to: “the inherent contradiction of a heterosexual yet patriarchal culture, inquiring how a concept of woman’s inferiority can be harmonized with a notion of a woman as the fit object of masculine desire” (329). 33 Ironically, it is Eve, of course, who draws this lesson; Adam paints a rather different picture in which “Wisdom in discourse with [beauty] / Looses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shewes” (VIII.552–3).


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“Her loveliness” (VIII. 547) makes her seem the culmination of creation as “one intended first, not after made / Occasionally” (VIII.555–6). If Eve is merely a copy of a copy then her very “secondness” in creation enacts her “secondariness,” and elsewhere Milton had stipulated that Eve’s creation, being subsequent to that of Adam, duly embodied this order of precedence reflecting both “the occasionall end of her creation” and the “indeleble character of priority, which God crown’d him with” (Tetrachordon; Col. 4.77). But Adam cannot help believing her to be a new and improved version of himself, the “fairest of Creation, last and best / Of all God’s works” (IX.896–7), enjoying the advantage of God’s “second thoughts” (IX.101). This response seems curiously close to the chain of reasoning pursued by Joane Sharpe in her lively Defense of Women (1617), verses composed in direct refutation of Swetnam’s notorious misogynistic tract: The arraignment of lewd, idle, forward, and unconstant women (1615). In this pithy couplet, Joane Sharpe effectively turns conventional patriarchal thinking on its head, so that the claims of “firstness” are surpassed by those of “lastness”: Women were the last worke, and therefore the best, For what was the end, excelleth the rest.34

Bearing in mind Peter Lindenbaum’s telling remark that “much of Milton’s most effective and affective writing” has gone into the poet’s descriptions of Eve (289), it is hardly surprising if the reader shares Adam’s uncertainties and finds it impossible to arrive at a consistent estimation of her place in Paradise. There is thus some degree of tension between the reader’s imaginative apprehension of Eve, suffused with mythological suggestiveness and poetic feeling, and the coldly calculated assessments made of her by Raphael. The cumulative weight of such powerfully evocative associations tends to overwhelm the angel’s rational but unsympathetic appeal to Adam, “For what admir’st thou, what transports thee so, / An outside?” (VIII.567–8), or his curt, dismissive reference to “all her shows” (VIII.575), entirely discounting the numinous aura that seems to emanate from her beauty. Indeed, Raphael’s strident voice at this point sounds alone, drowned out by the rapturous tones of Adam, Satan and, at times, the narrator himself – a most unlikely chorus. During the course of the epic, the question of precisely how to value Eve’s superior beauty, and the significance to be properly attributed to it, is

The poem concludes Ester Sowernam’s Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (Chapter VIII.81). As Nyquist persuasively affirms, “it is safe to say that Milton could not but have known that questions of priority figure prominently in the Renaissance debate over ‘woman’ we now know as the ‘Querelle des Femmes’ ” (107). Turner cites the example of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who composed “an extensive proof of Eve’s superiority in his De Nobilitate et Praecellentia Foeminei Sexu. Eve was the last, best creature, named after Life itself, ‘built’ by God from ensouled flesh in Paradise ... Adam was merely ‘formed’ by Nature out of the common earth whose name he bears ... Satan, enflamed with ambition and desire, approached her not as the weaker vessel but as the greater prize” (109). 34


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a genuine conundrum experienced at times by Satan, Adam, Eve and the narrator himself, and proves a dilemma for the reader too. The ecstatic references to “ravishment” (V.46; IX.541), “vehement35 desire” (VIII.526), “Transported touch” (VIII.530) and “rapine sweet” (IX.461) suggest the extremity of feeling associated with her presence. Significantly, in Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas such heightened expression is exclusively reserved for Adam’s communion with God (“O sacred flight! sweet rape! Love’s soverain bliss! / Which very love’s deer lips doth make us kiss,” II.i.1.434–5). While there is “no suggestion of Christ the spouse in Paradise Lost,” the imagery of religious sexuality “so marked in Milton’s milieu as to be flirted with even in the language of many Puritans” (Cope, 82) is entirely engrossed by Eve herself. Before the Fall then, Eve’s beauty begins to appear less like a created thing, merely a physical quality and a matter of externals only, than a force in its own right, operating independently. While we have already seen the potency of “Beauties heav’nly Ray” (IX.607) exerted as a quasi supernatural power for good, disarming Satan “Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge” (IX.466), other references to her “Beautie, which whether waking or asleep, / Shot forth peculiar Graces” and “Darts of desire” (V.14–15, VIII.62; emphasis added), suggest that it is also a potentially dangerous weapon that leaves Adam feeling “here onely weake / Against the charm of Beauties powerful glance” (VIII.532–3). At such times, Eve, “divinely fair, fit Love for Gods” (IX.489), does not appear a modest and humble mediator of a more exalted love; the love she offers seems less a means to an end than an end in itself, not merely “the sum of earthly bliss” (VIII.522; emphasis added), but – despite Raphael’s extolling of the virtues of angelic intercourse – the highest good imaginable. Indeed, unfallen Adam’s rapturous praise of Eve at times verges on idolatry, far exceeding the “uxoriousness” to which Milton had identified him as being particularly susceptible in De Doctrina Christiana (uxorius hic, I.11; Col. 15.182). The significance of this is plain when we remember what Milton never allows us entirely to forget, that “In the act of disobedience Adam simply chooses Eve over God: he rejects human love as a means and deifies it as an end” (Halkett, 122). Godfrey Goodman’s reflections in The Fall of Man seem pertinent at this point. “If I love beauty,” he maintains, “I will first love him, and fasten mine eyes upon him, that is the fountain of beauty, and beauty itself” (152). For the “allurements of the world,” including beauty, should be “the meenes too stirre up love and thankfulnesse to God; yet,” he cautions, “through our abuse they might be an occasion of our fall” (200). Augustine too had explained how although beauty, like every created thing, is good in itself: et bene amari potest et male, bene scilicet ordine custodito male ordine perturbato (“it can be loved both in a good way and in a bad way – in a good way, when due order is preserved, in a bad way when that 35

Of course, this expression is double-edged: the desire Adam experiences for Eve literally “drives him out of his mind” (Lat. vehere + mens). According to the Argument to Book VIII, it is through “vehemence of love” for Eve that Adam decides “to perish with her” by eating the forbidden fruit.


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order is disturbed.” DCD, XV.22). In the event, Eve’s beauty does not bring Adam nearer to God but causes him to break the chain that binds him to his Creator, and “the Link of Nature” (IX.914) draws him down the scala naturae. So Adam violates the hierarchy of creation when he allows, in Douglas Bush’s words, “idolatry of a creature to become his ultimate principle of allegiance” (1964, 162–3). Indeed more than one reader has found the terms in which Adam couches his description of the power of Eve’s presence disquieting: Eve completes his creation or rather re-creates him as her creature. Using vocabulary which immediately recalls Raphael’s recent account of the creation, Adam explains how Eve “infus’d” Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before And into all things from her Aire inspir’d The spirit of love and amorous delight.36 (VIII.474–7)

Just as the Spirit of God had “infus’d” the world with “vital vertue” (VII.236) and God had “breath’d” into Adam “The breath of Life” (VII.525–6), Eve literally inspires (L inspirare I lit., to blow upon, breathe into, inspire) not only Adam, but “all things,” with “the spirit of love.” Purvis Boyette hails Eve as “the creator of nothing less than human love and the inspiration for erotic love not only in man but in all nature” (1967, 29).37 Eve has become the Venus of universal nature, Venus Genetrix. VI At this point, the potential danger lies inert; it becomes active when Satan succeeds in persuading Eve herself to “attribute[e] overmuch” (VIII.565) to the significance of her “fairer” image. Seeing herself in the mirror of such adulation, it is hardly surprising if she too begins to find self-knowledge and a proper sense of her human limitations difficult to maintain. In the theological scheme of the poem, Eve is firmly set in an ordering, limiting and controlling context. The portrayal of her beauty as a thing in itself – independent, self-regarding and self-absorbed – begins to make it look as though she is freeing herself from her proper sphere. Eve is precisely not to think of herself as the goddess of beauty with all the glory and self-possession that connotes.38 36

Stein remarked upon a “troubling quality about this use by Adam of the image from the primary creation,” and he proceeds to argue persuasively that Eve “seems – by the metaphor he grants her – to be creating him in turn and in her image” (82). Similarly, Roberta Martin observed how, “Including the antanaclasis on ‘air inspires,’ this language is suspiciously like that in which Raphael tells Adam about his birth – that God ‘breathed’ life into his nostrils and he became a ‘living soul’ ” (63). 37 As Edwards puts it, “By her looks (i.e., by looking at him), so Adam explains to Raphael, Eve animates him (and ‘all things’) with love, as if she generates love” (240). 38 Grossman maintains that “In the economy of Milton’s Eden, Eve is to be for Adam; she becomes excessive when she is for herself” (150).


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It is a perspective that converges with Augustine’s definition of pride and his analysis of its workings in the individual soul: Quid est autem superbia nisi perversae celsitudinis appetitus? Perversa enim est celsitudo, deserto eo cui debet animus inhaerere principio, sibi quodam modo fieri atque esse principium. (DCD XIV.13) And what is pride but an appetite for inordinate exaltation? Now exaltation is inordinate when the mind abandons the ground in which it ought to be rooted to become and to be, in a sense, grounded in itself.39

The dangers of pride and excessive self-love (amor sui praeposterus)40 are the traditional morals drawn from the melancholy end of Narcissus too, of course. It seems not without significance that in his commentary on the myth, George Sandys draws a parallel between Narcissus and the rebel angels, finding in their fall another “fearfull example ... of the danger of selfe-love”; more telling still is the way he describes the process of their alienation from God: “intermitting the beatificall vision, by reflecting upon themselves, and admiration for their owne excellency, [they] forgot their dependence upon their creator” (160).41 In Ovid’s poem, metamorphosis undermines the existence of secure and stable boundaries between life and death and between divine, human, animal and even inanimate existence. In Raphael’s account of the possible elevation of mankind, the boundary between flesh and spirit is seen to be similarly permeable (V.478–9) and, by an apparently logical extension of this idea, Satan purposefully blurs the boundaries between the bestial and the human, the human and divine, life and death by reasoning that through the metamorphic agency of the forbidden fruit, “I of brute human, yee of human Gods. / So ye shall die perhaps, but putting off / Human to put on Gods” (IX.712–14), going so far as to imply that Eve may have already anticipated this process by uniting in herself the poles of a paradox as “Goddess humane” (IX.732).42 In both scenes of temptation, Satan suggests to Eve 39

Cf. Fowler’s note to IV.460–471, where he remarks upon the “considerable ironic force” of that passage: “for we know that Eve is to fall into precisely this error of seeking an end in herself or desiring an ideal self, until like Narcissus she ‘loves an unsubstantial hope and thinks that substance which is only shadow’ (Met. iii.417).” 40 This expression is used by Milton in De Doctrina Christiana to denote the absurdly excessive form of self-love that puts love of self before love of God (II.8; Col. 17.200). 41 Allen has commented on the way in which the fates of Satan and Eve begin to reflect upon one another mediated through the image of Narcissus (1960, 108–9). 42 By these “upwardly mobile,” hybrid forms – “brute human,” “human Gods” (IX.712) and “Goddess humane” (IX.732) – Satan deliberately confuses the integrity of the divinely sanctioned order of creation. To redeem fallen mankind, the Saviour will, of course, voluntarily descend the hierarchy, putting on flesh to become “God-man,” as Milton explains: Mediatorem nostrum Dei filium carnem esse factum, Deum atque hominem et dici et esse, quem idcirco Græci uno verbo aptissime Θεανθρωπον vocant (“the Son of God, our Mediator, was made flesh and is called God and human, whom for that reason the Greeks most aptly name by the single word theanthropos,” DDC I.14; Col. 15.272).

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that eating the forbidden fruit will enable her to “Ascend to Heav’n” to claim her rightful place, “by merit thine” (V.80), and live “among the Gods ... a Goddess” (V.77–8), a “Goddess among Gods” (IX.547). In the dream sequence, Satan aims to inflate Eve with feelings of self-exaltation, inciting ... distempered, discontented thoughts, Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride. (IV.807–9)

He seeks to awaken in Eve a conscious awareness43 of her superior beauty and to elevate the significance to be drawn from this fact. In the dream episode, Satan invites Eve to see, and to be seen. This is a reversion to her natal narcissism, but not with that original, forgivable innocence – Satan, as the first narcissist, invites Eve to see her beauty as matter for self-glorification; this is superficially exciting, but ultimately sterile and destructive. When he claims that the moon “with more pleasing light / Shadowie sets off the face of things” (V.42–3), Satan implies not only that moonlight will become her and will enhance the beauty of the world for her enjoyment, but that the moon shines “in vain” (V.43) without her presence as both subject and object of the gaze. “Eve’s new self-regard” will be, as Gregerson perceptively points out, “a learned narcissism, distinct from her infatuation with the image in the lake” (188). The Fallen Angel hails her as “Natures desire” celebrating her position as Venus Genetrix: In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment Attracted by thy beauty still too gaze. (V.46–7)

What makes Satan’s dream temptation so cunningly effective is, of course, that his words are so devilishly near the truth. What makes his address dangerously disruptive of the rightful order of things, and not a simple statement of fact, is its preface: “Heav’n wakes with all his eyes, / Whom to behold but thee” (V.44–5), positing Eve’s central position in the divine scheme. Given the audible echoes of Eve’s query of the previous evening, “But wherfore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (IV.657–8), it seems likely that Satan had continued to eavesdrop upon the conversation between Adam and Eve until they retired for the night and had overheard this abrupt question and calculated upon providing a more flattering answer than Adam could offer. Indeed, more than one critic has suggested that the question posed by Eve contained a latent desire for the answer that the voice in her dream supplied. As well as echoing the terms of her original query (“all eyes,” IV.658), Satan masculinizes it into “all his eyes” (V.44, my emphasis), giving it an additional charge. Not only does Heaven as well as Earth find its completion in Eve, but God too, it is subtly intimated, 43 For some interesting observations on the way in which “Eve is not only represented as beautiful, but with conscious beauty,” see Hazlitt (105).


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rejoices in His contemplation of her beauty and “Divine Semblance” (IX.606–7) as in the “Divine Similitude” of His Son (III.384). From here it is an easy step for Satan to urge her claim to “high exaltation” (V.91) as “a Goddess” “among the Gods” (V.78, 77) by virtue of her “Celestial Beautie” (IX.540). By elevating the significance to be attributed to her superior beauty and promoting a desire for selfaggrandizement, Satan prepares the ground for Eve’s temptation and fall. In the temptation proper, Satan, “extolling Eve above all other Creatures” (Argument to Book IX),44 encourages her to regard herself as the earthly and heavenly Venus, hominum divumque voluptas (Lucretius, De Rer. Nat. I.i) who should be worshipped as such: Fairest resemblance of thy Maker faire,45 Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine By gift, and thy Celestial Beautie adore With ravishment beheld, there best beheld Where universally admir’d; but here In this enclosure wild, these Beasts among, Beholders rude, and shallow to discerne Half what in thee is fair, one man except, Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen A Goddess among Gods, ador’d and serv’d By Angels numberless, thy daily Train. So gloz’d the Tempter, and his Proem tun’d; Into the Heart of Eve his words made way. (IX.538–50)

Eve is tempted to regard her beauty – made specifically to “delight” Adam “the more” (VIII.576) – not only as an end in itself, but also as a source of power that demands a wider sphere of influence than Eden can offer. Satan establishes a reductive perspective from which Paradise itself is viewed as “this enclosure wild,” whose inhabitants, “Beholders rude,” cannot appreciate her true worth and value. Although Satan is technically referring only to the animals of Eden here, the disparaging expression – that could just as well be applied to the savage and uncivilized as to the beasts – transfers itself to Adam himself whose inadequacy is, in any case, promptly made manifest in the lines that directly follow as Satan insinuates Adam’s insufficiency for her needs. She deserves, Satan suggests to her, to be the object of a universal admiring gaze in which she can bask in her subjects’ adoration: “one man except, / Who sees thee? (And what is one?) who 44 By hailing Eve with a host of honorific titles – “sovran Mistress” (IX.532), “sole Wonder” (IX.533), “Heav’n of mildness” (IX.534), “Celestial Beautie” (IX.540), “Goddess among Gods” (IX. 547–8), “Empress of this fair World” (IX.569), “Sovran of Creatures, universal Dame” (IX.612), “Empress” (IX. 626), “Queen of this Universe” (IX.684), and “Goddess humane” (IX.732) – Satan effects a verbal apotheosis of Eve. 45 By assigning to her the superlative (fairest), and to God the simple, adjectival form (fair), Satan’s address here is calculated to elevate Eve at God’s expense as well as Adam’s.

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shouldst be seen / A Goddess among Gods.” These last four words do not simply imply that her rightful place is in heaven amongst the angels, but, as the following lines make clear, that she should partake in the Godhead, “ador’d and serv’d / By Angels numberless.” Such beauty is not the generous, innocent beauty of the unfallen Eve; it is a subjugating power, a means of isolating Eve from her world, making her a spurious God, a greater, darker Narcissus. Satan’s apprehension that there may “terrour be in Love / And beautie” (IX.490–491) enables him to imagine this visionary apotheosis of Eve in which her nascent will to power is satisfied through the worship and service of her devotees. Such self-possessive beauty no longer invites love nor is it a quality to delight or be enjoyed, it is remote and unattainable, demanding reverence and awe. Eve does not dismiss this idea as mere “overpraising” (IX.615), but rather accepts it as her due. In the brief account offered by Genesis, the serpent tempts the woman with the thought that, should she and her husband choose to eat the forbidden fruit, then they would be “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. III.5). From the barest of hints, Milton elaborates the master-plan devised by Satan to deceive or “dis-eve” Eve – the pun was surely not lost on Milton – encouraging her to regard divinity as her right, “by merit thine” (V.80). Satan appeals to Eve’s awareness of her superior beauty; there is, he maintains, “no Fair to thine / Equivalent or second” (IX.608– 9). From this vantage point, Adam is clearly her inferior, not even a close “second” to her perfection. Satan then manipulates this argument not only to suggest that the creation is summed up in Eve herself alone – and not in Adam nor in them both collectively – but also to blur any sense of her inferiority to her Creator. Although Eve does not voice this thought out loud, we know, because the narrator alerts us to what has been left unsaid here, that when she reaches for the forbidden fruit what is actually on her mind is the prospect of deification, “nor was God-head from her thought” (IX.790); like her tempter before her, Eve “trusted to have equal’d the most High” (I.40). Only with the Fall does it become possible to consign Eve and her beauty to a clear and unequivocal position in the hierarchy of being; then and only then do the Son’s demands of Adam become unanswerable: Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey Before his voice, or was shee made thy guide, Superior, or but thy equal, that to her Thou did’st resigne thy Manhood, and the Place Wherein God set thee above her made of thee, And for thee, whose perfection farr excell’d Hers in all real dignitie. Adornd Shee was indeed, and lovely to attract Thy Love, not thy Subjection, and her Gifts Were such as under Government well seem’d, Unseemly to beare rule, which was thy part And person, had’st thou known thy self aright. (X.145–56)

Paradoxically, as Adam elevates human love above divine love, he falls under Eve’s Circean charm and into amore bestiale. Burning in lust (IX.1011–15), he is


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“sunk in carnal pleasure” (VIII.593). But despite Demetrakopoulos’ assertion that, “From the beginning of her creation, [Eve’s] sinister attractiveness partakes of Circean witchery” (99), until the Fall, Milton is careful to maintain a balance, albeit at times a precarious balance, between beauty’s power to promote, and beauty’s power to interfere with, man’s spiritual life. Even after the Fall, Milton’s brusque dismissal of Adam as “fondly overcome with Femal charm” (IX.999) is not his final word on the “charm of Beauties powerful glance” (VIII.533), however: ... beauty, though injurious, hath strange power, After offence returning, to regain Love once possest, nor can be easily Repuls’t. (SA 1003–6)

In Paradise Lost, though Eve’s beauty is wrested from its proper purpose, it is finally an instrument of reparation and redemption; Adam cannot long resist, “Creature so faire his reconcilement seeking” (X.943).46 VII In conclusion, let us revisit the passage with which we began, the one that explicitly aligns Eve with Venus, but this time with the lines that directly follow in view, as Eve: Undeckt, save with her self more lovely fair Then ... the fairest Goddess feign’d Of three that in Mount Ida naked strove, Stood to entertain her guest from Heav’n; no vaile Shee needed, Vertue-proof, no thought infirme Alterd her cheek. On whom the angel Haile Bestowd, the holy salutation us’d Long after to blest Marie, second Eve. (V.380–387)

Eve’s erotic sensuousness is cleansed of any hint of provocative sensuality by the immediate association with the Virgin, as Milton deftly changes the scene from a Judgement of Paris to an Annunciation tableau.47 The shift in emphasis acts as a counter-poise and casts a retrospective light by which Eve is seen to 46

See Chapter 7 for a more detailed discussion of Eve’s central role in the process of their reconciliation. 47 McColley has remarked upon this striking configuration: while “Renaissance sculptors and painters regularly and intentionally conflated or juxtaposed Eve and Venus, Venus and Mary, or Mary and Eve in order to compare Eve with Venus and contrast her with Mary,” Milton is, she believes, “the only artist who does the reverse.” However, as McColley proceeds to argue, Milton does not simply contrast Eve with Venus, he compares them too: “in order to challenge us to re-integrate in our view of primordial woman potentials which centuries of dualism have led us to fragment” (1978, 54).

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embody the dual nature of love both sensuous and chaste in its physical and spiritual manifestations. A transcendent union of contraries is thus rendered by this curious adjustment of focus and frozen in a transitory gesture as Raphael hails the naked Eve.48 The Church Fathers, complementing the typology of Christ as the second Adam, had developed the concept of Mary as the “second Eve” (V.387), restoring what was lost by the first: Quos Evae culpa damnavit, Mariae gratia solvit (“Those whom Eve’s guilt damned, Mary’s grace saves,” St Jerome, Epistola XXII.21). The angel’s greeting to the Virgin, AVE (“Haile,” V.385), spelt EVA backwards, and so verbally enacted how the consequences of Eve’s disobedience were reversed by Mary’s obedience. Milton’s explicit typological pairing of the two in line 387 carries particular weight given his anti-Catholic sentiments, but what is perhaps even more surprising is, as Dennis Danielson has noted, that this first “Hail” is located in a context in which “the typology ... functions mainly by way of similarity, not contrast,” and thus serves to impress upon the reader: “Eve’s being full of grace, her being unfallen, immaculate” (1989, 122). And yet, even in this most innocent of moments, Milton reminds his readers of what he never allows them to fully forget, that the pressure of contrary forces will ultimately prove too difficult to contain. “Hypnotically sexual” and “endowed with a mysterious, magical and highly powerful eroticism” (Demetrakopoulos, 99), Eve proves too great a distraction to Adam’s spiritual life. The second Eve will not be a second Aphrodite.

48 A similar frisson is generated when the Heavenly and Earthly Venuses of Botticelli’s masterpieces, The Birth of Venus and the Primavera are regarded together.

Chapter 5

The Vine and Her Elm: A Marriage Made in Paradise And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Gen. II.8–9)

While the garden is a symbol for mankind’s rightful place in the world, for how things should have been, Milton’s garden is no allegorical or decorative backdrop, but a dynamic, luxuriantly fertile world within which Adam and Eve live and work, a world that supplies their needs and to which they give form and beauty. Milton rightly saw the interpretive possibilities in gardening; the first man and woman are both gardeners whose own right relation is often viewed in horticultural terms, suggesting deeply-rooted affinities between Adam and Eve and the garden they are themselves tending. Eve, like Adam, takes a full and active part in the “sweet Gardning labour” enjoined upon the couple (IV.328). Indeed of the two, Eve arguably reflects more fully the image of God the “sovran Planter” (IV.691): not only does she partake in the divine power to promote growth, simply by the nurturing power of her presence, but she also displays a deeper sense of vocation, taking more seriously than Adam their duties and responsibilities in the garden. Unlike Sylvester, for whom gardening was a form of “pleasant exercise” in which Adam indulges, “More for delight, then for the gaine he sought” (Du Bartas, II.i.1.323–4), Milton impresses upon the reader that Adam and Eve’s “pleasant labour” (IV.625) in the garden is a vital part of prelapsarian existence.

Though Sylvester’s Eve is not assigned a role in the garden before the Fall, Sylvester does anticipate Milton by insisting that Adam’s life in Eden, though “voyd of painfull labour,” was not idle (Du Bartas, II.i.1.310). Yet in spite of such assurances, Sylvester’s Adam is never actually shown engaged in any gardening pursuits. Indeed it is “God himselfe (as Gardner)” who is imagined taking part in a range of gardening activities: “He plants, he proins, he pares, he trimmeth round / Th’ever green beauties of a fruitfull ground” (II.i.1.82, 86–7). McColley has drawn attention to the way, “Milton’s Eve is distinguished from all other Eves by the fact that she takes her work seriously” (1983, 110). It is very telling that on hearing the news of their exile from the garden, Adam laments the loss of places where he had conversed with God, Eve laments not her former existence per se, but, as Hiltner aptly notes, “her existence as a genius loci” (76). In The Georgic Revolution, Low singled out an insistence upon the dignity of manual labour as an unusual feature of pre-lapsarian existence in Milton’s Paradise.


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It is characteristic of Milton’s realizing imagination to recognize that unrelenting leisure would soon pall. Effortless innocence is totally alien to Milton’s idea of paradise. Only the animals in Eden “Rove idle unimploid” (IV.617); “Man hath his daily work of body or mind” (IV.618). Unsurprisingly, there is nothing passive about Milton’s concept of life before the Fall, and in this, as John Evans perceptively observes, he “revolutionized the traditional view of Eden and prelapsarian Man” (249). Milton’s commitment to his belief that humanity’s original condition was perfect and contained all things that were necessary for their dignity and happiness led to a unique balance being struck between Ovidian mollia otia (“soft ease”) and Virgilian durus labor (“hard work”). In Paradise, Adam and Eve’s “sweet Gardning labour ... made ease / More easie” (IV.329–31), but was also essential in a garden whose “wanton growth” (IV.629; IX.211) was, by its very nature, “Tending to wilde” (IX.112). The garden demands constant management on the part of the gardeners to contain its burgeoning energies. As John Evelyn maintained in his manual of horticulture, the Gard’ners Almanac: As Paradise (though of God’s own Planting) had not been Paradise longer than the man was put into it, to Dress and keep it; so, nor will our Garden (as near as we can contrive them to the resemblance of that blessed Abode) remain long in their perfection, unless they are also continually cultivated. (Address to the Reader)

Adam (IV.623–9), as well as Eve (IX.206–12), openly acknowledges that, despite their labours, the eagerly growing garden threatens to overwhelm their efforts; indeed, this assessment is confirmed by the narrator himself (IX.201–3). It seems evident that Milton would have found Evelyn’s warning of “how intolerable a confusion will succeed a small neglect” apposite, even in Paradise. The repeated emphasis on the need for continuous cultivation adumbrates the way in which gardening, the central activity in Paradise, will have a significant bearing on events leading up to the Fall. Eve’s sphere of agency in the garden is not confined simply to that of the informing presence of the genius loci. She is closely observed in a range of gardening activities, pruning, propping and tending the plants of the garden which, on more than one occasion, is seen as her particular domain, bearing evidence of its shaping by the “hand of Eve” (IX.438). In her diligent and dedicated cultivation of the arts of gardening Eve most nearly resembles Ovid’s fair gardener and goddess of fruit trees, Pomona. The hard-working Pomona typifies the practical,

See, for example, Lewalski (1969). This is not Sarah Annes Brown’s impression, however; she feels that: “both Eve and Pomona, despite the former’s protestations that she is overtasked, have to look hard to find any real work to do in their gardens, and have plenty of time to attend to the intricate niceties of their craft” (112). Although Eve is found to be “more lovely fair” than the “Wood-Nymph” Pomona (V.377–81), she is, nevertheless, most like her: “To ... Pomona ... / Likest she seemd” (IX.393–4).

The Vine and Her Elm

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“hands-on” approach to gardening: pruning, grafting and watering the trees herself. My particular purpose in this chapter is to trace the way in which the first marriage is figured through Pomona’s wedding of the vine to her elm. We shall see how Milton’s handling of the vine motif becomes a focus for furthering our understanding of the complexities of gender difference and the distribution of power in the first marriage, while at the same time casting light on the significance of Eve’s separation from Adam before the Fall and their reunion afterwards. I The association of Eve with the vine is unsurprising given the familiar lines from Psalm 128 used in the marriage service: “Thy wife shall be as the fruitfull Vine: upon the walls of thine House,” but in Milton’s hands the identification of Eve with “the fruitfull Vine” becomes more complex and suggestive than is commonly noted, a point of intersection between classical and biblical texts. The vine itself proves to be a composite image, an axis that holds together two opposing aspects of Eve, Janus-like. On the one hand, it proclaims her weakness, her dependence on Adam, and her vulnerability without his supporting presence; on the other it becomes a symbol of her active and independent power, a celebration of her beauty and fruitfulness. The reader’s dilemma cannot be resolved by merely rejecting one set of implications in favour of the other; we are neither invited nor permitted to choose between them until the morning of the Fall. We must simply accept that the two are placed in dramatic conflict, this very opposition playing its part in propelling the action to its crisis. Significantly, Eve is first associated with the vine in our introduction to the human pair. It is commonly noted how the passage evolves from visual description into an account of Eve’s relationship to Adam. Her “golden tresses” ... in wanton ringlets wav’d As the Vine curles her tendrils, which impli’d Subjection, but requir’d with gentle sway, And by her yielded, by him best received (IV.305–8)

The iconographic depiction of Eve’s hair advertises the hierarchical relationship between the two sexes in marriage: “Each descriptive detail is,” as Davis Harding once observed, “subordinate to one, large, informing idea — the dominant position of man in the relationship between Adam and Eve” (1962, 69). Eve acknowledges Adam to be her “Author and Disposer” in a divinely imposed system in which he is accountable to God, and she is accountable to Adam: “so God ordains, / God is thy Law, thou mine” (IV.635–7). This is a compressed rendering of St Paul’s statement of the clear-cut chain of command in which “the head of every I am extending an interesting observation by Norford that “woman is at once greater and lesser, stronger and weaker, than man” (1978, 3).

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man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. XI.3). This emphasis on the husband’s “headship” and the wife’s “subjection” is in keeping with definitions of the marital relationship developed by other Reformers. Daniel Rogers argued uncompromisingly that “the first Dutie of the Wife [is] Subjection,” (253), while William Perkins’ definition of “a couple,” as “that whereby two persons standing in mutuall relationship to each other, are combined as it were in one,” unfolds with a similar emphasis: “And of these two,” Perkins continues, “the one is alwaies higher, and beareth rule, the other is lower and yeeldeth subjection” (10). William Whatley hammered the point home in his advice on how to be “a good wife”: “let her set downe this conclusion within her soule: Mine Husband is my superior, my better: he hath authoritie and rule over me” (189–90). These forthright statements of the inequality of the sexes place husbands and wives in an unequivocally hierarchical relationship of greater and lesser, superior and inferior: “Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd” (IV.296). However, in spite of this authoritative pronouncement that sexual difference declares sexual inequality, we need not read the account of Eve’s relationship to Adam very searchingly to become aware of certain unresolved tensions in the passage introducing Adam and Eve. Indeed, while still deferring to the authority of St Paul’s pronouncements on gender hierarchy, Milton had tempered them elsewhere to encourage a more positive understanding of this hierarchical relationship, referring to it in Tetrachordon as the “golden dependence of headship and subjection,” and minimizing the disparity between the sexes by observing that: “it is no small glory to [man] that a creature so like him, should be made subject to him” (Col. 4.79, 76). Such tension can be felt in the work of other writers and is characteristic of an age in which male dominance rested uneasily with mutuality, “Collateral love, and deerest amitie” (VIII.426). It is a difficulty admitted by Godfrey Goodman; the succession of concessive and qualifying conjunctions (though, but, yet) in the following lines are testament to his determination to harmonize notions of equality, superiority and inferiority in a faithful rendering of the conflicted position of a wife in marriage: “Though she be made of the ribs, and every way equall as touching her condition, but for her beauty and comelinesse far excelling man, yet in government she is inferior and subject to man,” before being drawn to conclude that for the sake of order, “between man and wife there must be a superior” (253). Such a position sounds clear, but builds in conflict, as Alan Sinfield has pointed out: “The wife is to receive the respect due to an equal partner, but also to be subordinate”; it would evidently be “difficult in practice to decide where affectionate trust and shared responsibility should give way to male authority” (65). The potential for conflict is all the greater when, as in Eve’s case, “submission does not remove the impulse towards independence” (Hyman, 44), exemplified from the outset by her likeness Elsewhere, as we have seen, Milton had glossed St Paul’s words in a way that clearly anticipate the wording of the present passage (Tetrachordon; Col. 4.76). See Haller and Haller (235–72); Haller (296, 312); Sinfield (49–70).


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to the vine, whose eagerly growing tendrils demonstrate a natural propensity to reach beyond their proper bounds. With the first appearance of the vine motif there thus exists some degree of tension between the image of the vine and the narrative assertion it is supposed to complement. Moreover, the hierarchical scheme apparently set forth so clearly and succinctly in our first introduction to the human couple proves to be further qualified as well as defined by the central image of their marriage, the wedding of the vine to her elm.10 Let us now look more closely at the scene that unfolds as Adam and Eve set about “thir mornings rural work” in the garden and are observed by God employed ... where any row Of Fruit-trees overwoodie reached too farr Thir pamperd boughes, and needed hands to check Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine To wed her Elm: she spous’d about him twines Her marriageable arms, and with her brings Her dowr, th’adopted Clusters, to adorn His barren leaves. (V.211, 212–19)

This passage illustrates Milton’s ability to include a symbolic episode and hold it up as a mirror to reflect certain less obvious areas of meaning without causing the narrative to pause unduly. It appears shortly after Eve’s account of her disturbing dream to Adam and his comforting explanation of it to her. It is thus, most obviously, indicative of the newly restored peace and accord between the couple after the divisive experience of the previous night, expressed through the harmony of their actions. This interpretation seems to be confirmed by an analysis of the figurative level: the passage, with its heavy insistence on “wedded love” (“wed,” “spous’d,” “marriageable,” “dowr”),11 ritually re-enacts their courtship and marriage with remarkable precision. As the focus shifts from the gardeners to the garden in line 215, the human couple is transformed emblematically into the vine and the elm they are themselves tending. II The emblematic picture of the sturdy elm and the clinging vine underlies Milton’s portrayal of the first marriage12 and is apparently the means by which he would 10

See Demetz’s short but thought-provoking article. In a more recent study, Sammons has carefully analyzed how the classical images of “a vine curling around an elm” and an “ivy clinging to a tree ... coalesce to suggest both the special nature of prelapsarian marriage and the possibility of Adam and Eve’s sinning” (117). 11 See Lerner (305). 12 Although Anand emphasizes “the emblematic character of many pictures in Paradise Lost” (21), she makes no mention of the vine-elm figure.

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translate into graphic visual terms the abstract hierarchical conception of a relationship in which Eve’s dependence on Adam is central. That it is employed primarily to symbolize a relationship of support and dependence would seem to be confirmed by the more explicit metaphor of the flower and her prop in Book IX (432–3), and this interpretation appears to gain further support from Milton’s own earlier use of the vine-elm figure in his pamphlet Of Reformation in England, where he argues for the self-sufficiency of the Church thus: I am not of opinion to thinke the Church a Vine in this respect, because, as they take it, she cannot subsist without clasping about the Elme of worldly strength, and felicity, as if the heavenly City could not support it selfe without the props and buttresses of secular Authoritie. (Col 3.i.22–3)

In any case, we are sufficiently prepared for a more profound layer of suggestiveness and the way in which the emblem relates Eve to Adam, as vine to elm, by traditional poetic usage.13 “The vine-prop elm” (FQ I.i.8) remained one of the most cherished items of gardening lore handed down from Roman writers.14 Virgil, for example, in a few prefatory lines to the Georgics, had proclaimed his intention to instruct his reader when to join the vine to the elm (ulmis ... adiungere uitis, I.2). More pertinently, “The idea that the elm is wedded to the vine it supports is,” as Fowler observes, “very ancient: Horace Odes II xv 4 [and Odes IV.v.29–30] already take its familiarity for granted” (note to V.215–19; emphasis added). In his Epithalamium, Catullus seems to have been the first poet to exploit the inherent potentiality of the image for illustrating human marital relationships, but the emphasis lies entirely upon the female vine’s insufficiency without the masculine elm. The vine’s complete dependence upon the elm is used as an exemplum to further the argument of the chorus of young men: the Iuvenes are anxious to impress upon the contending chorus of determined virgins the essential benefits of marriage for a woman. Without the sustaining presence of the elm, the vine sprawls in the dust, neglected, blighted, and fruitless: Vt uidua in nudo uitis quae nascitur aruo numquam se extollit, numquam mitem educat uuam, sed tenerum prono deflectens pondere corpus iam iam contingit summum radice flagellum; hanc nulli agricolae, nulli coluere iuuenci: at si forte eadem est ulmo coniuncta marito, multi illam agricolae, multi coluere iuuenci: sic uirgo, dum intacta manet, dum inculta senescit; cum par conubium maturo tempore adepta est, cara uiro magis et minus est inuisa parenti. (LXII.49–58) 13 Roland Mushat Frye has observed that, “rather general associations of the feminine vine with the masculine tree had been directly connected, in the visual arts, with the story of the first parents long before Milton wrote Paradise Lost” (247). See too Giamatti (323). 14 See Svendsen (133).


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Just as the unwed vine that grows on naked ground Can never raise herself, never produce ripe grapes, But bending down frail body under her prone weight With topmost tendril’s tip can almost touch her root; Never has farmer tended her and never oxen; But it she happens to be joined to a husband elm, Then many farmers, many oxen have tended her: A maid too while untouched grows old the while untended, But when in due time she has made an equal marriage, She’s dearer to a man and less trying to her parents. (Guy Lee)

It is interesting to note in passing that in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s only use of the vine-elm topos, the figure is similarly employed to illustrate the vine’s utter dependence upon the elm. Again, significantly, no indication is given that the reverse might in some sense be true, or even that the vine herself may have valuable gifts to offer in exchange for support. Adriana, mistaking Antipholus of Syracuse for his twin brother, her husband, addresses him as the sturdy tree to which she, the weak vine, must cling for support: Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine: Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine, Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate. (II.ii.173–6)

The vine-elm figure would seem, then, the natural emblem to crystallize a hierarchical relationship between the first man and woman. In Book IV, in spite of the undercurrent of tension noted in the passage, the vine-like Eve, once joined to her elm, is seen to be charmingly compliant, all that is submissive, soft, and yielding,15 but in Book V Milton is presenting a relationship that is subtly different. The hierarchical conception is now substantially qualified as well as defined by the image. Milton’s lines in Book V, with their emphasis upon an exchange of gifts (the vine needing support but giving beauty and fruit in return)16 are closer in feeling, thought, and expression to the use of the vine-elm figure as it appears in a tale original to Ovid, the story of Vertumnus’ wooing of Pomona.17 15

Halkett emphasizes, “the association of the ‘female’ vine with dependence and submission on the one hand, and with the idea of frailty requiring gentleness of treatment on the other” (104). Wentersdorf discovered in Milton’s conception of the garden in Paradise Lost a straightforward contrast between the “trees – stately and strong and thus images of masculinity” and the flowers, “beautiful and frail, and thus an embodiment of the feminine principle” (134). But Milton’s complex use of the vine-elm topos exposes this countering of masculine (strong) with feminine (weak) as an evident oversimplification. 16 See Summers (84). 17 This episode, one of the longer tales in the poem (150 lines), is a story of Ovid’s own devising and features Pomona’s first appearance in a literary context. Vertumnus, in contrast,

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III Associated by the Romans with “the movements of the seasons towards ripeness,”18 Vertumnus in many ways presented the perfect match for Pomona,19 “the Goddesse of Hortyards and their fruitfull productions, taking from thence her name” (Sandys, 661). Experiencing some initial resistance to the idea of marriage from this selfreliant and independent young woman, Vertumnus uses the example of the fruitful marriage of the vine and elm before them to compliment the wood nymph on her gardening skills and to advance his suit. By wedding georgic with nuptial imagery, Vertumnus suggests that Pomona’s devotion to promoting the fertility of her garden is too narrowly focused since she is neglecting any possibility of bearing fruit herself: ulmus erat contra speciosa nitentibus uvis: quam socia postquam pariter cum vite probavit, “at si staret” ait “caelebs sine palmite truncus, nil praeter frondes, quare peteretur, haberet; haec quoque, quae iuncta est, vitis requiescit in ulmo: si non nupta foret, terrae acclinata iaceret; tu tamen exemplo non tangeris arboris huius concubitusque fugis nec te coniungere curas.” (Met. XIV.661–8) There was a fine looking elm tree opposite, laden with gleaming grapes. After he commended the tree, together with its partner, the vine, he said: “But if that tree trunk stood there unwedded to the vine, it would have nothing for which it might be sought after except for its leaves alone; so too this vine, which is joined to it and rests on the elm, if it were not married, would lie sprawling upon the ground. But you are not touched by the example of this tree and you fly from marriage and do not take care to join yourself to another.

Instead of merely emphasizing the vine’s dependence upon the elm as Catullus had done, Ovid’s usage seems designed to stress the reciprocal nature of the relationship and becomes in his hands an emblem of complementary harmony between the sexes. It is intimated that a man and woman should, like their fruitful is the subject of an elegy by Propertius (IV.2). It seems likely that Ovid happened upon a reference to Pomona when researching Italian legends for the Fasti. See Myers (245). 18 Like Pomona, the name Vertumnus is etymologically suggestive. Myers has helpfully detailed the three etymologies offered for his name by the god in Propertius’ poem: “(1) from his turning back of the flood waters of the Tiber (4.2.10 Vertumnus verso dicor ab amne deus), (2) from the offerings of the first-fruits of the ‘turning’ year (4.2.11 quia vertentis fructum praecepimus anni), and (3) from his ability to turn himself into many forms (4.2.47 quod formas unus vertebar in omnes)” (235). In the Metamorphoses and Paradise Lost it is the last two suggested etymologies that are exploited by Ovid and Milton respectively. 19 Nevertheless, Vertumnus and Pomona are not paired together elsewhere in Latin literature.


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counterparts in nature, use their respective gifts to mutual advantage. Ovid goes even further than this by suggesting implicitly the elm’s incompleteness without the vine. By emphatically referring to the elm sine palmite as a truncus rather than an arbor, he is able to draw subtly on the connotations of the adjective, which is used to describe something imperfect in itself, lacking in, or being deprived of something essential. This is appropriate to the deeper dynamics of the first marriage in which Adam is always acutely aware of his incompleteness without Eve: “In unitie defective” (VIII.425).20 While Ovid does concede that without his female companion the elm’s shady leaves would still be of intrinsic worth, Milton, as if deliberately answering him on this point, denies even this attribute to be of any value by disparagingly referring to the elm’s leaves as “barren” (V.219), an epithet particularly damning in a world in which fruitfulness is the summum bonum.21 The lines now reflect rather badly on Adam: the elm’s height and strength go unmentioned; though emblematically a tree, he is rendered here, by implication, little more than a lifeless stake. This is not a tangential complexity. It may be timely to recall that Adam is first glimpsed by Eve “Under a Platan” (IV.478). Fowler has claimed that this is because “the plane was a symbol of Christ,” urging that, “This association seems more probable than those who made the platan tree a symbol of erotic love.” However, Milton is almost certainly mining another vein of association here:22 Horace contrasts the bachelor plane, platanus caelebs, to the married elm (Odes, II.xv.4–5), while in the Georgics, Virgil more damagingly refers to the planes as barren, steriles platani (II.70), and Quintilian, apparently echoing Horace and Virgil, similarly contrasts the steril[is ] platan[us] with the elm that weds the vine, marit[a] ulm[us] (Inst. Or. VIII.iii.8). The upright tree of itself would seem to have little to offer, its only contribution being to promote the vine’s fruitfulness. Yet, even this value is cast into doubt for the vine, by contrast, is seen as fruitful and self sufficient, in no need of support. Indeed, in our first view of Paradise, attention is drawn to “the mantling vine” which “Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant” (IV.258–60);23 this is a very different picture from the fruitless, unwedded vines of Catullus and Ovid that languish in the dust. The vine’s ripe and active fruitfulness takes its place amongst a significant constellation of images substantially linking the feminine principle, and Eve in particular, to abundance, vitality and life. While female potency pulses on a 20

See Boyette (28). On this point, see also A. G. George (65–74). In God’s commandments to the couple “To Till [the Garden] and keep” it (VIII.320), and to “Be fruitful, multiply” (VII.396), “Propagation is what is urged,” following His own “prolific example” (Le Comte, 87). Critics have often commented upon the preeminent importance assigned to the creative process by Milton in Paradise Lost. Indeed Rajan concluded that for Milton “goodness is fertility” (1945, 299), while Le Comte enthusiastically declared the poem to be “a hymn to creation” (85). 22 For a different view, see McColley (1983, 81). 23 The abundant growth of the vine is singled out for mention again in Raphael’s account of creation: “Forth flourish’t thick the clustring Vine” (VII.320). 21

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subterranean level, quickened through imagery and allusion, on the level of surface statement creativity remains an exclusively male prerogative in Milton’s scheme. Accordingly, Marcia Landy maintains: “The principle of creativity, the highest principle of the cosmos is denied to woman. The Father and Son bound the cosmos. The male poet creates the epic and the author and disposer of woman is her husband” (11). So too, Sandra Gilbert has insisted that Paradise Lost is an example of the “patriarchal etiology that defines a solitary Father God as the only creator of all things”; from this perspective, the poem illustrates the “historical dispossession and degradation of the female principle” (1978: 368, 374). However, such a view is a convenient over-simplification and, in Gilbert’s article at least, serves only to take us back to the old stereotype of “Milton’s well-known misogyny” (374). The cosmos of Paradise Lost is animated by “two great Sexes” (VIII.151, emphasis added). Not only does Milton somehow manage “to introduce a female element into a purely masculine cosmic scheme,” as W. B. C. Watkins suggests (60), but there are even intimations that life is produced by a self-sufficient Nature independently of a male generative principle. In the Metamorphoses, the Earth spontaneously gave birth to living things in a range of species after the Flood (Cetera diversis tellus animalia formis / sponte sua peperit, Met. I.416–17); this self-fecundating power reappears, more surprisingly in Milton’s Paradise, where we learn that in Eden Nature, “Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will, / Her Virgin Fancies” (V.295–6), rejoicing in her own creativity. This is a notably “Virgin” Nature, untouched by any creating male agency, yet luxuriantly energetic: “Wantond” and “plaid at will” strongly suggest her exuberance and independent volition. What makes the celebration of Nature’s autonomous powers of creativity particularly striking at this point is that it comes less than half a dozen lines before the sexually charged description of noontime: “now the mounted Sun / Shot down direct his fervid Raies to warme / Earths inmost womb” (V.300–302).24 Yet, as we later learn from Raphael’s lecture on heavenly hierarchies, the sun, for all its penetrative power, is – unlike the “fruitful Earth” (VIII.96) – of itself “barren” (VIII.94). As David Aers and Bob Hodge have astutely noted, this suggests that, “The apparent excellence of the active male principle is illusory.” So too, the intriguing parallel with human sexuality prompts speculation about the earthly hierarchy: just as fruitfulness begins to seem “the prime end of nature,” perhaps, “man, in spite of doctrine to the contrary, exists for woman? As instrumental to her fruitfulness?” (19–20). 24 In an influential essay, Parry observed how often in Ovid the sun is “a masculine symbol of unbridled, primitive energy” (277). An example of the sun as a symbol of sexual potency is to be found in the description of the scene of Proserpina’s abduction (Met. V.388– 9). The shady spot may seem to offer protection against the sun, but, as Hinds has pointed out, the expression used to denote the sun’s rays, Phoebeos ... ictus, contains an image of “striking” associated with the arrows of Phoebus, and so the particular phrasing foreshadows the sexual violence that is to follow here (31–2), especially since ictus could also be used of male ejaculation (see Segal, 1969, 54). Milton plays out this possibility here (V.300–302), where the shooting of the sun’s rays is expressly envisaged as an act of sexual penetration. Note too, Earth’s explicitly sexual invitation to the Sun in Elegia quinta (93–5).


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There are, as I have shown, recurrent intimations of an underlying affinity between the abundance and fertility of Eden and Eve herself.25 Recent criticism has noted how references to the couple’s expected fruitfulness tend to cluster around Eve to the exclusion of Adam: 26 she is the genius loci, maintaining its fertility and infusing life into the plants.27 Witness the numinous aura that surrounds Eve on her first departure to garden alone: Milton celebrates the nurturing power of her presence – the reiteration is strongly emphatic – as, “With Goddess-like demeanour” (VIII.59), she ... went forth among her Fruits and Flours To visit how they prosper’d, bud and bloom, Her Nurserie; they at her coming sprung And toucht by her fair tendance gladlier grew. (VIII.44–7; my italics)

The plants joyously respond to her animating presence and beneficent touch; Friedman has noted the play on “gladlier” in the final line that economically conveys how the delight attributed to the flowers “registers as more emphatic and healthier growth” (130). Confronted with such a powerful account of Eve’s fructifying influence, the lines cannot be discredited as mere hyperbole; indeed, we may be inclined to agree with Adam that, deprived of her informing presence, the fertile garden would rapidly become a dark, desolate wasteland of “wilde Woods forlorn” (IX.910). Eve possesses her own natural authority in the garden that is distinct from Adam’s,28 and she has a different set of priorities from him.29 Observing Adam

25

See too, Demetrakopoulos (103). One of the most striking examples of this tendency occurs at the start of Raphael’s visit when, as Lewis duly noted, “The angel hails [Eve] more ceremoniously than Adam” (121). Rauber pointed out that while Eve is regularly likened to Roman fertility goddesses, Adam is rarely assigned a mythical role (60). See also Hutcherson (1960, 16). In spite of the finely detailed process of association by which Milton identifies Eve with Pomona, at no point does Milton link Adam with Vertumnus. DuRocher posits that this is “perhaps because the god’s shiftiness is inappropriate to Adam’s stable character” (98), but another explanation may also offer itself (see Chapter 6). 27 The genius loci is a feature of Milton’s early works: Christ’s Nativity (186); Il Penseroso (154); Arcades (26ff) and Lycidas (183). Knott made the connection between Eve and such tutelary divinities (1971, 114), and McColley was the first to remark on the similarity between the genius loci in Arcades and Eve (1983, 126). For a more expansive exploration of this aspect of Eve’s role in Eden, see Hiltner. 28 Friedman draws a distinction between the types of authority vested in Adam and Eve respectively: “Genesis gave [Milton] the myth of Adam’s naming of the beasts as a sign of sovereignty; Milton gives Eve the authority to name the flowers, as another instance of the way in which ‘true authority in men’ may nevertheless be ‘not equal’ (IV.295–6) though evidently sovereign” (126). There are, of course, no flowers to name in the biblical Eden. 29 This emerges more clearly still in the gardening debate, see 138–40. 26

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entering upon “studious thoughts abstruse” (VIII.40),30 Eve concludes that her time would be more productively spent at work in her garden. Eve not only fosters the natural forces of growth and fecundity inherent in the garden by her mere presence, but by her careful cultivation of the plants therein she shows herself driven by the same desire as Pomona to improve upon the state of Nature.31 Although, as Flannagan observes, the narrator declares a clear preference for “profuse natural gardens” over “contrived and regulated” gardens that are the product of overly sophisticated or “nice Art” (IV.241),32 he nevertheless commends the aesthetically pleasing effect of the “thick-wov’n Arborets and Flours / Imborderd on each Bank” (IX.437–8) that give evidence of Eve’s handiwork. In this way, her creative influence on the garden mends the traditional opposition between Nature and Art,33 and in her gardening capacity, Eve gives practical expression to the civilizing and refining impulses in mankind that enhance beauty and serve to promote human culture. IV The hierarchical scheme apparently set forth so clearly and precisely in our first introduction to the human couple has gradually dissolved before our eyes, blurred by ambiguities and uncertainties, with teasing and elusive suggestions of Eve’s self-sufficiency and Adam’s insufficiency. In Book V (212–19) the vine easily overpowers the elm, which appears curiously colourless in contrast. All the poetic 30 Eve’s departure can be read as an implicit criticism of Adam’s abstract intellectualizing brought out by the horticultural pun in “abstruse.” If we dig down to the Latin roots of the word abs trudere (abs, away from; trudere, to thrust, push forth, especially of plant growth), its usage seems to intimate the misdirection of Adam’s creative energies here. 31 The landscape in Pomona’s garden is emphatically cultus; Ovid affirms: qua nulla Latinas / inter hamadryadas coluit sollertius hortos (“amongst the Latin wood-nymphs none was more skilful at cultivating gardens,” Met. XIV.623–4), and, a few lines later, refers to her cultos ... hortos (“well-tended gardens,” Met. XIV.656). 32 This seems in deliberate contrast to “all kinds of sweet all-coloured roses” in Sylvester’s Eden which are disposed “In true love-knots, tri-angles lozenges” of so intricate a design that “(one would think) the Angels daily dresse” them (Du Bartas, II.i.1.513–15). 33 The competitive relationship between Nature and Art is a recurrent preoccupation of the Metamorphoses. As Feldherr has observed: “Throughout the work, art and nature are notoriously unstable categories: elements of the natural world seem to aspire to the perfection and order of art, but the ultimate manifestation of artistic excellence is the illusion of reality” (176). Nevertheless, Nature may imitate and improve upon Art as in the case of Diana’s grotto, arte laboratum nulla: simulaverat artem / ingenio natura suo (“not fashioned by art, but Nature imitated art using her own natural gifts,” Met. III.158–9), and vice versa, as when Pygmalion niveum mira feliciter arte / sculpsit ebur formamque dedit, qua femina nasci / nulla potest (“with breath-taking art successfully carved a figure out of snowy ivory, and gave it a beauty more perfect than that of any woman ever born,” Met. X.247–9).


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energy in the description centres upon the vine: once led to her elm (the possessive adjective carries an emphatic proprietorial charge in this context), she takes the initiative by actively insinuating the elm into her entwining arms and clasping him in a close, amorous embrace. Erotically charged though this is, it is hard not to read a certain insidious, threatening intent into this embrace, especially given the elm’s utter passivity.34 This mysterious female force is the more alarming for being at once yielding and overwhelming: the vine’s “curled tendrils imply subjection it is true, but also the kind of encroachment which may ensnare and destroy as well,” as Harding has noted (1962, 72).35 Is there a more sinister connection between the luxuriant abundance of Eve’s hair and the profusion of the “mantling vine”? It seems at least worth remembering that the natural attributes of the “vine-prop elm” (firmness, strength, durability) were passed over in silence. In the event, the upright elm will itself yield to the pressure of the vine it was supposed to have held erect. At a subterranean level of the action, both instances of the vine motif have some bearing upon the moment of crisis. It is interesting to speculate upon the possible significance of the parallel progression of events surrounding both examples. The way in which the wedding of the vine to the elm prompts recollection of the similar tableau in Book IV, when Eve is discovered half embracing Adam as she leaned upon him (494), cannot be ascribed to mere chance. As the scene Eve has conjured up of her initial reluctance to be led to Adam fades, she discloses her dependence on and adherence to him, and, as a token of this, reposes upon him as vitis requiescit in ulmo (“the vine rests on the elm,” Met. XIV.665). The wedding of the vine to her elm could be said to re-enact emblematically the action in this passage. Eve has just finished recounting to Adam how she had been found lying beside a pool, vainly engaged in offering “soft imbraces” (IV.471)36 to her own insubstantial reflection. Her Guide had then raised her from this recumbent pose and led her to where she could descry the “fair ... and tall” (IV.477) figure of Adam who was, henceforth, to be her “Guide” (V.91) and “best prop” (IX.433); God’s “redressing” of Eve to an upright stance is of especial significance in a poem in which there is so much play upon the wider moral implications of physical posture.37 34 Compare the sexually predatory embrace of Salmacis: Ut ... solent hederae longos intexere truncos (“as ivy is accustomed to wrap itself around tall tree trunks,” Met. IV.365). 35 Roland Mushat Frye also notes a similarly disturbing ambivalence in treatments of the vine motif in the Medici tapestries and in the “Creation of Eve” by Andrea Pisano (147– 8). See too Giamatti (324) and Le Comte (7). See also Ricks’ discussion of the significance of Eve’s “wanton ringlets” and “the ‘wantonness’ of Eden” (112). (But note also Fish’s view of the reader’s interpretative dilemma here, 92–103.) 36 Eve also resembles the untended vine in needing someone to “check” her “fruitless embraces.” This is made clear at IV.477–80, when she turns back from Adam to the “smooth watery image” in the pool (Evans, 253). 37 See especially Jones, but also Ricks’ discussion of the significance of “redress” at IX.219 (146) and Sammons’ comments (122).


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In both the classical and Christian traditions, humanity’s erect stature not only elevated human beings above the other creatures of the earth, indicating their fitting sovereignty over them, but also linked them with their Maker, being in some way expressive of His “image, not imparted to the Brute” (VIII.441). According to Ovid, the creator finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum. pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus. (Met. I.83–6) … fashioned man in the likeness of the gods that govern everything. And although all other animals on all fours look at the ground, he gave to man an uplifted face and bade him see the sky and lift his head erect towards the stars.

Indeed, in our first introduction to Adam and Eve, they are distinguished from the other living creatures surrounding them with telling emphasis as being “Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, / Godlike erect,” who “In naked Majestie seemd Lords of all” (IV.288–90; my italics). That the upright stance of human beings elevated them above the other creatures was a commonplace of hexaemeral writings that had the authority of a number of classical authors, but Milton’s lines are remarkably close to Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses. Since George Sandys in his commentary on the passage emphasized how “Lastly man was made with an erected looke to admire the glory of the Creator” (58), it is interesting to ponder the significance of Milton’s curiously ambiguous expression that man “might erect / His Stature” (VII.508–9, emphasis added). Richard Bentley’s abrupt expostulation, “as if his Erection were superadded to his Form by his own Contrivance; not originally made so by his Creator,” draws attention to the possible ambiguity in these lines. Milton’s choice of words here allows the reader to interpret humanity’s erect stature as conditional upon a proper response to their creation, thus exemplifying the wider freedom of moral action ascribed to human beings by a God who expressly created them “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (III.99). The significance of this line of interpretation becomes apparent if we recall that when describing her initial reaction to life and the world about her as she found herself “repos’d / Under a shade of flours” (IV.450–451), Eve outlines a setting that demands comparison with the corresponding section in Book VIII where Adam in turn gives an account of his first moments of consciousness: “As new wak’t from soundest sleep / Soft on the flourie herb I found me laid” (VIII.253– 4). The underlying artistic design is evident: Milton compels us to compare and contrast their respective responses.38 Adam’s first impulse is to look up “Strait toward Heav’n,” and then, “As thitherward endevoring,” “up [he] sprung,” and “upright / Stood” (257–61) like a fair, tall tree. As in the Metamorphoses, man’s 38

See Bundy (159) and Norford (1975, 26–7).


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erect posture and upturned countenance are designed not only to distinguish him from the animals he is to rule, but also to draw his gaze upward to contemplate the heavens (Met. I.84–6). Eve, too, contemplates the sky, but the sky reflected down into a pool beside which she has lain to gaze into its waters. Both Adam and Eve first look at the sky, the one directly, the other at its reflection in the water. This aptly symbolizes their respective relationship with God: Adam was made for God, she for God in him. Thus when Raphael visits them in Eden, Adam is keen “to know / Of things above his World, and of thir being / Who dwell in Heav’n” (V.454–6), as it were looking straight up into the sky, but Eve prefers to hear Raphael’s answers through Adam, at second-hand. Eve prefers physical reality over abstract thought; her way of looking into the sky is to look down at the clear water; her way of apprehending God is through His works, like the vine she is closer to the earth than the lofty elm. This perspective is supported by Janet Adelman’s perceptive observation that “the newly created Eve finds herself lying down and presumably must stand up to get to the pool, but Milton suppresses the movement: we see her lying down, then lying down again” (61); elided in this way, the passage suggests, as Stephanie Demetrakopoulos puts it, that “the naturally erect male posture is not so naturally Eve’s” (104). The effect of these deftly managed alternations between the horizontal and vertical planes must be to trouble the reader with as yet half-formed doubts about Eve’s willingness or sufficiency to stand alone. Before being led to her elm, Eve is like the vine, which unless it is held erect, displays its natural propensity to trail upon the ground, and either “creeps” (IV.259), “crawls” (Comus 294) or terrae adclinata iaceret (“would lie sprawling on the ground,” Met. XIV.666). So too, it is not by chance that the vine is led to the elm just after Eve’s dalliance with Satan, whom she allows (albeit only in a dream) to supplant the position Adam now holds as her “Guide” (V.91) and to draw her away from his protection and support. The likely result of such a substitution is made sufficiently clear by the ensuing events of the dream itself. Having isolated Eve from Adam’s supportive presence, Satan encourages the growth of discontent within her. “Taste this,” he urges, “and be henceforth among the Gods / Thy self a Goddess, not to Earth confind” (V.77–8). She, aspiring upwards, apparently overreaches herself and, when deprived of her false guide, sinks down again to earth. As Eve herself describing the experience relates: “up to the Clouds / With him I flew” (V.86–7), wondring at my flight and change To this high exaltation; suddenly My Guide was gon, and I, me thought, sunk down, And fell ...39 (V.89–92) 39 Noting how the projected evolution of mankind is figured by the divine spokesman Raphael as the growth of a plant which, rooted securely in the earth, finally flowers and fruits as spirit, Hiltner argues that Eve’s Fall comes about because she tries to uproot herself and pull free of the earth in an attempt to anticipate this gradual ripening process. On both occasions, Eve’s “fall” can thus be viewed as a “failed ascension,” to use Hiltner’s apt phrase (70–73).


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Eve falls, but only into sleep; the next time she leaves her true “Guide” and “prop” will result in complete ruin. Eve, as yet sinless, wakes in fear and, recoiling from the “offence” (V.34) of her dream, instinctively clings to Adam. Her innocence is thus symbolically reaffirmed by this embrace and also by the fruitful embrace that the vine bestows upon her elm. Of course, as is commonly noted, the Satanically inspired dream enacts the actual circumstances of Eve’s fall more nearly than the earlier incident of Narcissistic self-absorption,40 for man was not to fall “Self-tempted, self deprav’d,” like the devil, but “deceiv’d” by Satan (III.130). Even so, despite the professed moral of the episode that “beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair” (IV.491–2), Eve’s account of her experience by the pool, with its intimation of her preference for the “Fairest resemblance of [their] Maker faire” (IX.538), had, as we have seen, furnished Satan with an invaluable insight into how best to frame his dream temptation, and at the same time reminds us that Eve’s beauty may tend to blind both Adam and Eve to a “just estimation”41 of her human limitations. Adam confides in Raphael his evident anxiety about the significance to be attributed to her richly fruitful beauty. “Inexplicably fuller and rounder than her original, more potent and fecund” (James Stone, 37), Eve is perceived by Adam as the culmination of creation, relegating him to the position of inferior prototype in consequence. Female amplitude begins to destabilize the accepted view of gender: woman usurps man’s position as the “perfecter sex” (An Apology for Smectymnuus; Col. 3.306) so that whatever “she wills to do or say, / Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best” (VIII.549–50). V The first challenge to Adam’s headship is posed on the morning of the Fall, when Eve attempts to take the lead in planning the day’s activities. As Fowler noted, this is the first time that Eve has taken the initiative in an exchange of this kind between the couple, and the narrator marks the occasion by telling emphasis: “Eve first to her Husband thus began” (IX.204). Given Eve’s strong sense of calling, it is to be expected that her mind will have been preoccupied by the way the demands of the burgeoning garden are outstripping their means to manage it. Although Eve ostensibly offers Adam an opportunity to guide her on what course of action they should take, she does not hesitate to issue him with a set of detailed instructions, thinly disguised as alternatives. She has clearly already determined the outcome in advance: 40

For a different reading of both episodes, see Fish (217–25) and McColley (1978, 25–46). 41 In Sermon 17, Donne revealed a very strong sense of a woman’s inferiority and was intent upon bringing woman “to that just estimation of her self, That she will be content to learn in silence with all subjection ... that she is ... but a Help: and no body values his staffe, as he does his legges.”


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Thou therefore now advise Or hear, what to my minde first thoughts present, Let us divide our labours, thou where choice Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind The Woodbine around this Arbour, or direct The clasping Ivie where to climb. (IX.212–17)

Unlike Adam, Eve is not content merely to “keep” the garden “from Wilderness” (IX.245); she wants to improve upon it, so the initial motivation prompting her suggestion that they garden separately is not so much an attempt to wrest control from Adam nor a bid for independence and personal autonomy, but rather an expression of her desire to maximize their impact upon the garden by instituting a division of labour that will ensure an increase in productivity and efficiency by removing the distraction of amorous “Looks,” “smiles” and “Casual discourse” (IX.222–3). In the exchange that follows it becomes evident that Eve – like Pomona, for whom her garden was her chief delight and overriding concern (hic amor, hoc studium, Veneris quoque nulla cupido est, “This was her love; this was her vocation; nor did she have any desire for love,” Met. XIV.634) – assigns a higher priority to their work in the garden than to the love between them. Eve has a purpose that not only does not require Adam, but also is better served in his absence; Adam by contrast feels bereft without her. If one cannot imagine an Eden without Eve, there is something curiously appropriate about an Eden without Adam, a Paradise in which Eve tends her garden without human distractions. Adam evidently senses something of this, and such a line of thought plays upon his insecurities. Adam is clearly anxious lest Eve be weary of his company (“But if much converse perhaps / Thee satiate ...” IX.247–8), and so, when for the first time he is faced with a situation in which Eve is not willing simply to echo his thoughts and feelings, he fails to impress upon her his position as “Head” (VIII.574),42 but instead allows himself to be manoeuvred into acting against his better judgement: But if thou think, trial unsought may finde Us both securer then thus warnd thou seemst, Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more; Go [...] So spake the Patriarch of Mankinde (IX.370–373, 376)

Again, as in line 247 above, the opening “But,” remains telling: Adam is abdicating his proper function here, conceding ground when he should be holding firm. Adam rightly believes they are stronger together than apart, but tries to convert his surrender of authority into a command by the emphatic reiteration of the imperative, “Go.” While the reader cannot help feeling with Adam that Eve’s enforced obedience at this point would indeed absent her more than allowing 42

This is the very accusation that, after the event, Eve will ironically level against Adam. Now taking as self-evident her insufficiency without him, she demands: “Being as I am why didst not thou the Head / Command me absolutely not to go” (IX.1155–6).


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her physical departure – that she would thereby have been objectified into little more than an ivory statue or “a liveless Rib” (IX.1154) – the impression of failed authority remains strong, and is intensified, as Flannagan has astutely observed, by Milton’s choice of epithet for Adam at this point: “Patriarch of Mankinde,” ironically underscores his possible dereliction of duty: he is not being patriarchal, fatherly, or even “manly” enough to control his wife ... After the Fall he will be asked “Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey” (10.145) and “was shee made thy guide” (146), indicating that Adam abrogated his responsibility when he obeyed her, rather than acting as her guide and commanding her not to go.

Donne’s position was similarly clear-cut, affirming the wife’s proper lack of self-determination which he found symbolized in the circumstances of woman’s creation: “Since she was taken out of his side, let her not depart from his side, but shew her self so much as she was made for, Adjutorium, a Helper” (Sermon 17). It is significant, then, that Adam and Eve are not only observed leading the vine to the elm, but are first discovered engaged in the other important task of the vinedresser, pampinatio, the lopping or trimming of superfluous growth: ... where any row Of Fruit-trees overwoodie reached too farr Thir pamperd boughes, and needed hands to check Fruitless imbraces. (V.212–15)

By describing the boughs or “arms”43 of the fruit-trees as “pamperd,” Milton introduces two mutually supportive chains of connotation. On the one hand, since “pamper” was an accredited derivation from the Latin pampinus, a tendril or vine-shoot, it would seem that Milton already has in mind the vine (which he mentions explicitly in the line that directly follows) as one of the fruit-trees in need of pruning.44 But of course, on the other hand, “pamper” signifies “to over-indulge (a person) in his tastes and likings generally” (OED). I have already observed how, in the first use of the vine motif in Book IV, Eve’s hair is likened to tendrils which “in wanton ringlets wav’d” requiring “Subjection” (306, 308) just as the “wanton growth” of the plants “Tending to wilde” (IX.211–12) 43

James Brown notes how the “series of muted ambiguities” that “precede the pun on ‘embraces’ has the effect “that ‘trees’ or ‘boughes’ acceptably possess the mobility, the motivation, the moral responsibility of sexually driven creatures; Adam and Eve ... have become guardians of morality in a world ominously prefiguring their own weaknesses” (16–17). 44 As Newton explains, “the propriety of this expression will best be seen by what Junius says of the etymology of the word pamper. The French word pampre, of the Latin pampinus, is a vine-branch full of leaves: and pamprer, he says, is a vineyard overgrown with superfluous leaves and branches”; Fowler also comments on this secondary play first noted by Newton.


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requires continuous cultivation.45 The very first description of Eve thus becomes immediately enmeshed with Adam’s role as gardener in Eden. Adam’s task, then, demands vigilance and discipline; it must include the pruning of any ambitious desire for pre-eminence on Eve’s part and the guidance of her back to his side should she attempt to reach beyond him. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton had attributed the Fall to Adam’s uxoriousness and Eve’s failure to heed her husband (uxorius hic, mariti illa inobservantior; I.11; Col. 15.182). The application of this line of thought to the situation in Paradise Lost is only possible after the event, when the evidence becomes incontrovertible that Adam has proved remiss in his conduct towards Eve, allowing her to overreach herself and fatally withdraw from his protection and support. Both Adam and Eve fail in their marital duties as conceived by Perkins: the first duty of a wife, he had argued, was “to submit her selfe to her husband; and to acknowledge and reverence him as her head in all things” (310), while the husband was to show his love “in protecting her from danger” (124). “Hence it followeth,” Perkins concluded, “that the woman is not to take libertie of wandring, and straying abroad from her owne house, without the man’s knowledge and content” (131–2). In connection with this, it is interesting to note how Adam, in his attempt to persuade Eve not to stray from his side (IX.265–9), argues that his presence “shades” and “protects” her (my italics),46 implicitly likening himself to the sheltering elm. Significantly, Milton now seems to be attributing a more positive function to the elm’s “barren leaves” (V.219). So, too, remembering the earlier allusion to the Platan (IV.478), it is interesting to note Patrick Hume’s observation that it was “so named from the breadth of its Leaves, πλατυσ Gr. Broad, a Tree useful for its extraordinary Shade: Jamque Ministrantem Platanum potentibus umbram. Geor.4.” Adam could have sheltered the vine-like Eve from exposure to the coming storm. VI If horticultural lore may be applied to human affairs, Virgil gives the best advice in that part of his farming manual devoted, significantly, to viniculture: Ac dum prima nouis adolescit frondibus aetas, parcendum teneris, et dum se laetus ad auras palmes agit laxis per purum immissus habenis, ipsa acie nondum falcis temptanda, sed uncis

45 See Lewalski (1969, 86–117 and (1974, 7), where she draws out still further the implications of the correspondence between the growth of the external garden and the maintenance of the “paradise within” (XII.586) to demonstrate that Milton did not conceive of prelapsarian life as an easy and effortless state of frozen perfection. 46 Compare Jane’s comforting words to Rochester: “Plants will ... take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop” (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter 37).


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carpendae manibus frondes interque legendae. inde ubi iam ualidus amplexae stirpibus ulmos exierint, tum stringe comas, tum bracchia tonde (ante reformidant ferrum), tum denique dura exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentis. (Georgics II.362–70) As long as your vines are growing in first and infant leaf, They’re delicate, need indulgence. And while the gay shoots venture Heavenward, given their head and allowed to roam the sky, Don’t use a knife upon them yet — a fingernail Is enough for pruning their leaves and thinning them out in places. But when they’ve shot up and are holding the elms in strong embrace, Dock the leaves, lop the branches: Till now they could not bear the steel; now you must show them Greater severity, curbing their frisky wanton growth. (C. Day Lewis)

The moral is plain: Adam can afford to be lenient towards the pliant, submissive Eve “that feard to have offended” (V.135), but when she displays increasing assertiveness in the gardening debate, he should have checked this unruly growth more forcefully: tum stringe comas ... tum denique dura / exerce imperia et ramos compesce fluentis.47 It is interesting to note too in passing that the primary meaning of coma is “the hair of the head,” and only by poetic transference does it come to mean “leaves” or “foliage.” This is especially suggestive in view of the implied connection between the profusion of Eve’s hair and the “mantling vine” and the significance that this has come to assume during the course of the epic. In addition, when Eve takes her leave of Adam to garden alone she is found to particularly resemble Pomona the gardener-nymph: [Eve] Delia’s self In gate surpass’d and Goddess-like deport, Though not as shee with Bow and Quiver armd, But with such Gardning Tools as Art yet rude, Guiltless of fire had formd, or Angels brought. To Pales, or Pomona thus adornd, Likest she seemd, Pomona when she fled Vertumnus. (IX.388–95)

That Milton intends the reader to recall Ovid’s account is confirmed by the distinctly audible echoes of this introductory sketch of Pomona in the Metamorphoses by which he proclaims his indebtedness. Sarah Annes Brown has noted the way Milton advertises the resemblance between the two, “Like Eve she is defined by 47

Lewalski has suggested how Adam might have resolved the dispute (1974, 13). Rogers had given similar advice to the husband in difficulty “not to insult, threaten, and domineer over her as a Lord ... but by all loving waies tenderly to draw her, and to convince her by the strength of reason” (265). See also Sammons’s contribution to the gardening debate (122–4).


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reference to what she is not, and the gardening tools she carries are contrasted with the weapons of Diana and her nymphs” (111): non silvas illa nec amnes, rus amat et ramos felicia poma ferentes. nec iaculo gravis est, sed adunca dextera falce, qua modo luxuriem premit et spatiantia passim bracchia conpescit. (Met. XIV.626–30) She cared nothing for woods and rivers, but only for meadows and the branches laden with ripe apples. She is not laden with a spear, but instead carries a curved pruning hook in her right hand with which she checked wanton growth and trimmed the branches spreading out on every side.

Milton’s open allusion to this passage is not perhaps as important as the ironic effect of the camouflaged allusion his lines contain.48 For, by the inevitable extension of the comparison between Eve and Pomona, the reader recalls the significant detail that the gardening tool with which Pomona arms herself is the pruning-hook designed to check over-luxuriant growth and “boughes that dare / Transcend their bounds” (Sandys, Met. XIV.629–30).49 Once again the vine-elm topos thus draws together related passages into a pattern of converging significance and sheds light on future developments. Eve is at once Pomona and the “wanton growth” that should have been pruned, uncurbed here because Adam has failed to check Eve’s impulse to independence. Virgil’s firm line would have had the approval of the divine spokesman, Raphael. He had urged Adam: ... weigh with her thy self; Then value: Oft times nothing profits more Then self esteem, grounded on just and right Well manag’d; of that skill the more thou know’st, The more she will acknowledge thee her Head. (VIII.570–574)

But Adam understandably failed to adopt this deceptively easy formula for managing his relationship with Eve, and it is scarcely surprising if he, and at times the reader too, has found it impossible to get this “crude weighing operation to come out right” (Lindenbaum, 289).

48

DuRocher considers another aspect of the ironic significance of this comparison: since Pomona did not in fact fly from Vertumnus’ attentions in Ovid’s account, he concludes that: “If Eve, like Pomona, is fleeing her lover unwisely, then the result may be the sterility of which Vertumnus warned” (98). For further possibilities, see Chapter 6. 49 Sandys’ translation seems particularly apt at this point; Sarah Annes Brown has noted how Sandys’ phrasing “seems to be echoed” at IX.208–10 and V.212–15 (112).

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VII Moreover, until after the Fall, the awareness of personal limitation, dependence and mutual need is in fact much more acutely experienced by Adam than by Eve.50 Indeed, Adam even attributes to her the godlike self-sufficiency that he had reserved for their Creator alone before her creation: “so absolute she seem[ed] / And in her self compleat” (VIII.547–8). Eve’s air of self-reliance is most strongly in evidence on the two occasions when she leaves Adam to garden by herself. It is undeniable that when she leaves him to garden alone on the fatal morning of the Fall she seems particularly vulnerable. Yet the reader cannot but recall the inviolable air that attended her the first time she departs to garden by herself (when she appeared a majestic figure of truly “Goddess-like” stature, not less but more than equal) and wonder at the change. Milton now openly focuses attention upon her inadequacy: Eve is discovered foolishly self-absorbed, lost in her own world, oblivious of any threat or danger ... oft stooping to support Each Flour of slender stalk, whose head though gay ... Hung drooping unsustaind, them she upstaies Gently with Mirtle band, mindless the while, Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour, From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh. (IX.427–8, 430–33)

This brief but delicately executed sketch of Eve, glimpsed as the “fairest unsupported Flour” amongst her flowers, possesses, like the vine-elm figure it parallels so closely, other qualities beside the purely pictorial. The image gathers together the significance of what has preceded and prepares for what follows.51 Moreover, in contrast to the peaceful gardening activities of Book V, which only incidentally make the reader uneasy, the image here is no longer primarily horticultural: it is explicitly linked with the imminent tragedy at every point. Again, unlike the earlier image of the vine and her elm, the metaphor of the flower without her prop suggests exclusively Eve’s “frailtie and infirmer Sex” (X.956). 50 As Revard has pointed out, “the notion of the human being as incomplete is not first noted by Eve, but by Adam” (1973, 74). See Norford (1978, 12) and Rauber’s comments on IX.309–17 (68–9). Critical contention has tended to centre upon the question of Eve’s sufficiency without Adam, attributing more or less significance to their separation in Book IX. The controversy continues but, as Webber perceptively concluded, “the whole relationship between Adam and Eve, in fact, is affected by this stress between self-sufficiency and mutual need ... either position, overindulged, becomes destructive, and balance is hard to maintain” (12). 51 It seems noteworthy that Ovid had contrived a similar effect in the Metamorphoses. Pomona’s etymologically suggestive name (poma [n pl] fruit, fruit from an orchard) encourages the reader to see her as part of the garden that she tends. For further discussion of the implications of this line of interpretation, see Chapter 6.


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At the figurative level, at least, the outcome of Eve’s encounter with Satan is never in doubt, but we are encouraged to feel that properly pruned and supported the vine would have been able to weather the storm, contemnere uentos (Georgics II.360).52 However, the lines above not only prepare for her collapse, “exposed” by Adam to the oncoming “storm,” but also look forward to the more passive and unassuming, but no less important, role Eve is to play when “much-humbl’d” (XI.181) she freely confesses her dependence on him in terms that are clearly significant for the line of thought we have been tracing here, as she acknowledges Adam to be her “onely strength and stay” (X 921; my emphasis). As the emphasis now falls upon Eve’s incompleteness without Adam, the image of the vine languishing without her “strength and stay” seems singularly appropriate. Moreover, only a minute adjustment of focus is necessary to render the scene curiously familiar. Milton introduces Eve’s speech with an account of how she approached Adam: ... with Tears that ceas’d not flowing, And tresses all disorderd, at his feet Fell humble, and imbracing them besaught His peace. (X.910–13)

“That physical description,” as Joseph Summers recognized, “with its specific recollection of the ‘Tresses discompos’d’ (V.10), the ‘imbracing’ (V.27), and the tears (V.129–35) ... had characterized Eve’s earlier appearance when she repented merely her dream of sin” (178). E. M. W. Tillyard, too, has commented upon the way in which this earlier scene seems to serve as “a foreshadowing of the human motions of sin, repentance, forgiveness in love and continued life which are played out between Adam and Eve on the heroic scale in Book X” (1930, 74). These observations form a valid and pertinent commentary upon one of the ways in which this central scene prompts recollections of other related incidents and draws them together into a larger pattern of significance. However, we are still making fewer demands upon the lines than they will serve, for the parallel between this scene and the one at the beginning of Book V is more extensive than either Summers or Tillyard’s readings would seem to suggest: they stop short of the critical allusion to the image of the vine and her prop, and the weight of associations this brings to bear on the present passage. The wedding of the vine to her elm forms, as I have shown, a natural pendant to the scene which directly preceded it and which it parallels so closely, restating emblematically the reconciliation of Eve to Adam after the divisive experience 52 Compare Goodman’s insistence on a husband’s responsibilities to his wife: “Hath God made her the weaker vessel? then she wants the protection of her husband; she the more impotent and weaker of counsel? then she ought to be instructed and taught by her husband” (257). Sammons is less inclined to make excuses for Eve: “Adam is Eve’s ‘best’ prop, not her only prop ... . She was strong enough. She could have withstood the storm. And she can blame only herself for falling” (24).


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of the dream temptation and “fall.” It is interesting to speculate whether the reappearance of the vine-elm motif betokens a similar significance here. That Milton intends the reader to recall these complementary scenes is confirmed by several significant points of contact. Eve’s words at XI.176 are noteworthy not only for the volte face they contain (the reversal of her confident assurance in her own self-sufficiency, which led her away from Adam’s protection and support in an active assertion of independence), but also because it seems no coincidence that Eve is submissively likening herself to a plant in need of support and restraint. Touched by her prostration before him, Adam “uprais’d her soon” (X.946).53 Adam’s re-dressing of Eve to an upright stance is an action that speaks louder and reverberates more powerfully than any prosaic statement could of the proper relationship of support and dependence, authority and subjection that must now exist between them. The dynamic tension that complicated our attitude to Eve’s relationship to Adam, embodied not only in the narrative action but in the complex patterning of ideas, images, values and feelings, is now resolved completely. This ultimate resolution paradoxically involves loss and gain. Stripped of her mythological pretensions and self-assurance, Eve’s heroic stature as “Goddess humane” (IX.732) is exchanged for the humility and dependence essential for Christian salvation. By embodying the virtues necessary for salvation, Eve becomes, as Sharon Seelig argues, “not merely Milton’s ideal of womanhood but the pattern for all mankind after the Fall.”54 Indeed, the view that the relationship between man and woman was for Milton a type or image of that between God and the soul seems confirmed by the way in which the relationship of support and dependence between fallen man and woman is seen to reflect the proper relationship between God and mankind after the Fall. Eve’s “lowlie plight / Immoveable till peace obtain’d from fault / Acknowledg’d and deplor’d,” clearly looks forward to fallen mankind “in lowliest plight repentant” (X.937–9, XI.1; my italics). Moreover, this parallelism in turn throws light on the apparent inconsistency that has troubled some editors between lines 1087 and 1099 in Book X and the first line of Book XI. The traditional defence put forward by commentators such as Zacharay Pearce, and repeated here by Fowler, is that when Milton says Adam and Eve “in lowliest plight repentant stood’ (XI.1, my italics), “there is no literal contradiction of ‘prostrate’ at X.1099, since stood means ‘remained.’ ” However, their clearly physical prostration at X.1087 and 1099 exerts pressure on stood, encouraging us to take it literally. It seems more likely then that Milton intends to show that physical prostration has been replaced by

53

“Eve’s ‘fall’ at Adam’s feet begins to restore what was lost in her first fall. Where she had sought superiority and had fallen, here she humbles herself and is subsequently ‘upraised’ ” (Schoenfeldt, 84). 54 Abstract of a paper published in MQ 10 (1976), 24, revised and published as “Our General Mother: The Pattern for Mankind.”


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“manly erectness,”55 especially since this would continue the parallelism between the scene of Adam’s forgiveness of Eve and God’s forgiveness of mankind.56 Just as Adam raises Eve in token of his reconciliation to her, Milton here effects the quiet miracle of the beginnings of mankind’s regeneration after the Fall as Man is held erect once more by God. The emblematic image of the plant and its support thus becomes invested with theological significance as it merges with the traditional Christian emblem of God, the prop of the fallen, as the Father holds out the promise that mankind “yet once more ... shall stand,” “Upheld by me” (III.178): By me upheld, that he may know how frail57 His fall’n condition is, and to me ow All his deliv’rance, and to none but me. (III.180–182)

The emphatic antimetabole underlines the strength of God’s support, Man’s dependence, and the new conditions that obtain in the fallen world where Man is no longer sufficient to stand alone but must “on him sole depend” (XII.564). In this way, the connotative value of the Ovidian image of the “vine-prop elm” expands and deepens in association with, and is finally absorbed into, Christian truth. Indeed, mankind is instructed in the Schola Cordis: Thou cans’t not stand Without a prop to boulster thee. To trust to thine owne strength would soon betray thee. (Christopher Harvey, Emblem 37)

So too the figure of the vine and her elm will finally find fulfilment in the Son himself: through his incarnation he will combine the qualities of the fruitful vine and the supportive elm. In Christ’s own metaphorical conceit, he identifies himself as the “true vine,” his Father, the vine-dresser, and the branches regenerate mankind who are engrafted58 in him: Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit he purgeth [prunes] it, that it may bring forth more fruit... . As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches. He that abideth in

55

Shumaker (198). “Prostrate” is generally used of something normally erect as “a tree” or “person” (OED), and see XI.758–9, where Adam falls into despair literally and metaphorically “till gently reard / By th’Angel, on [his] feet [he] stood ... at last.” 56 See Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of this point. 57 Consider Hume’s gloss on “frail,” which reads: “How unable to support itself ... of fragilis, Lat. easily broken.” 58 Milton’s discusses this horticultural metaphor in De Doctrina Christiana (I.18; Col. 15.366).

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (John XV.1, 2–6)

The branches depend upon the vine as their means of support and sustenance without which they would wither and die. Their capacity to bear fruit is also dependant upon their connection to the vine and also upon the vine-dresser, who tends to the branches, cutting away the deadwood and pruning the healthy branches to ensure they produce more fruit. Milton’s use of the figure of the vine and the elm is of pivotal significance: it looks to classical texts as well as to sacred scripture; it anticipates the Fall, as well as the means to mankind’s regeneration. Although the elm’s “barren leaves”59 may prefigure the “fruitless hours” (IX.1188) that Adam and Eve spend apart after the Fall, in leading the vine to wed her elm, Milton prepares for Adam and Eve’s reconciliation and the continuation of the human race through their children,60 while the fruitful vine looks forward to their eventual redemption through the “the seed of Woman” (XII.379), Christ who will be the “true vine.”61

59 Taken together with the allusion to the sterilis platanus, the elm’s “barren leaves” may well suggest Christ’s cursing of the barren fig tree (Matt. XXI.19). (I am indebted to Anthony Low for this suggestion.) 60 Commenting on V.215, Broadbent observes that by “leading ‘the Vine to wed her Elm’ it is as if Adam and Eve were rearing children and giving them in marriage” (177). 61 Roland Mushat Frye remarks that in one tradition of Judaic and primitive Christian art the vine was associated with the Tree of Life and “the vine and its grapes became symbolic of sacrifice and redemption through Christ” (247). Parallels between Eve and the Son are further developed in Chapter 7.

Chapter 6

“Access Deni’d”: The Virgin in the Garden Prelapsarian sexuality was a difficult and delicate topic. Following the lead apparently supplied by St Paul, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Cor. VII.1), the vast majority of patristic authorities had felt sex to be virtually synonymous with sin; even married Christians were tainted by sexual activity. Is sex itself sin, and, if so, does that mean there was no sex before the Fall? Was sex the real cause of the Fall, under the phallic symbolism of the tempting snake? Or, was there paradisal sex in Eden, far different from its fallen counterpart? Milton boldly confronts such questions, working a plausible, if often elliptic, human sexuality into his Eden, before, during and after the Fall. Eve is the point of convergence for opposing views of sexuality in Eden: on her seduction, benign by Adam and malign by Satan, rests the future of mankind. I In the unfallen world no conflict between the two opposing ideals of chastity and married love had yet arisen: the disjunction between virgin and bride was unknown in the state of innocence. The intertwining of the “Laurel and Mirtle” to form the roof of the nuptial bower (IV.694) signified emblematically the oneness of chaste beauty and sexual love in Eden. In his commentary on Ovid’s tale, George Sandys had enlarged upon the particular appropriateness of the metamorphosis of Diana’s devotee Daphne into laurel: “She is said ... to fly his [Apollo’s] pursuit, in that they [laurels] affect the shadow; and to repell the fire of lust, in not being scorched by the Sunne or Lightning”; Daphne is thus “changed into a never-withering tree, to Although it is likely that St Paul was quoting from the letter sent by the Corinthians to him, this statement helped to determine Christian thought on women, marriage and celibacy for over a millennium. For instance, commenting on 1 Cor. VII.1, Tertullian argued: ergo malum est contingere; nihil enim bono contrarium nisi malum (“It follows that it is evil to have contact with [a woman]; for nothing is contrary to good except evil,” De Monogamia, III). Likewise Jerome evinced a similar line of thought, but went further, pointing out that St Paul non dixit, bonum est uxorem non habere, sed bonum est mulierem non tangere: quasi & in tactu periculum est (“did not say, it is good for a man not to have a wife: but, it is good not to touch a woman: as though there were danger even in the touch,” Adversus Iovinianum, I.4). Ambrose affirmed that all Christians, but especially the clergy, should keep themselves unsullied by sex (De officis ministrorum, I.50.258).

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shew what immortall honour a virgin obtaines by preserving her chastity” (74). Myrtle, in contrast, was the plant especially sacred to Venus, the goddess of love, and constantly associated with her in the works of “Venus clerk Ovide,” as Chaucer had styled him in the House of Fame (1487). Eve combines the roles of virgin and bride with daring simultaneity of effect as Milton continues to associate her with virginal figures even after her marriage to Adam when she is no longer apparently – at least in the usual technical sense of the word – a virgin. I say apparently because Milton never unequivocally states that they did have sex; he only speculates that once in bed Adam would not have frigidly turned his back on Eve, and that she, for her part, would not have denied him if Adam had made sexual advances towards her: ... nor turn’d I weene Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites Mysterious of connubial Love refus’d. (IV.741–3)

Milton could cite biblical authority to sanction sexual love in the prelapsarian world since God’s commandment to “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. I.28) predated Adam and Eve’s temptation and Fall. This injunction is echoed in the paean to “wedded Love” where the narrator exhorts, “Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain / But our destroyer, foe to God and Man?” (IV.748–9). Milton’s positive attitude to unfallen sexuality is also registered in the disdainful lines that dismiss out of hand: Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk Of puritie and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure. (IV.744–7)

Of course, accepting outright that sexual intercourse took place before the Fall was not without its attendant difficulties as Milton would have been all too aware. Confronted by the repercussions of prelapsarian love-making, Sylvester found himself beset at every turn with a host of questions that admitted no easy answer. Despite loud protestations that he would not allow himself to become embroiled in such “questions intricate,” Sylvester stumbles on for more than a hundred lines “in wandring mazes lost” (II.561) as he ponders: What children there they earned, and how many, Of whether sex: or, whether none or any: Or how (at least) they should have propagated, If the sly malice of the Serpent hated, Causing their fall, had not defil’d their kin, As Flannagan observes, “strictly speaking, Milton does not assert that Adam and Eve made love, since ‘I weene’ means ‘I assume’ or ‘I guess’” (465, note 214). For a fuller discussion, see Lehnof’s closely argued essay.

“Access Deni’d”

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And unborn seed, with leprosie of sin. If voyd of Venus; sith unlike it is, Such blesséd state the noble flowr should miss Of Virgin-head; or, folk so perfect chaste Should furious feel, when they their loves imbrac’t, [...] Or, whether else as men ingender now, Sith Spouse-bed spot-less laws of God allow, If no excess command: sith else again The Lord had made the double sex in vain. (Du Bartas, II.i.1.654–63, 668–71)

Milton’s restraint stands in pointed contrast to this endless maze of speculation. Indeed, Edward Le Comte has commended the way in Paradise Lost, “There is no fussing over such old questions as whether if the first couple made love before the Fall, they conceived, in which case their first offspring would be free of original sin; or, if they did not conceive, why not (as part of a perfect coition)” (72). Milton simply sidesteps such traps for the unwary and “quietly leaves intact the almost universal assumption that Adam and Eve do not procreate in the body until after the Fall” (52). While Thomas Luxon’s point here is certainly valid, it is nevertheless also the case that many readers would join with Diane McColley in affirming that in Milton’s epic, “chaste sexual love is frankly praised as the crowning pleasure of paradise” (1983, 66). Although, in keeping with epic decorum, the physical intimacy Adam and Eve are observed sharing in Paradise does not extend much beyond kissing and embracing, there are, nonetheless, several highly charged moments between the couple and a number of occasions when the language used to describe the bower assumes an unmistakably erotic colouring, which encourage the assumption that they are sexually active before the Fall. Yet in spite of the strong impression thus sustained, Milton endeavours to draw attention to Eve’s virgin state at carefully chosen points in the narrative. This referential system becomes most dense as Eve’s successive encounters with Adam, Raphael and Satan are cast as oblique trials or tests of her chastity. Before the Fall, then, Milton deftly manipulates the motif of Eve’s virginity, interweaving a number of different mythological strands to create a richly braided effect that intensifies his thematic design. II The most straightforward way of accounting for the persistence of this motif after the wedding is by situating it in the context of the high estimation accorded to married love by the Reformers. In the eyes of Protestant and Puritan preachers marriage had been, in the words of Daniel Rogers, “stained by the unjust aspersions of Popery” (11–12). William Perkins had condemned the Council of Trent for Turner, for example, concludes that Adam and Eve have “a full but infertile sexual life in Paradise” (37).

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opposing “marriage and chastity,” since thereby, “it plainly determineth that in marriage there is no chastity” (112). By ending this opposition, Reformers, such as Rogers, hoped to put an end to the “Popish magnifying of virginity” at the expense of marriage (11–12). In his treatise on Christian Oeconomie, Perkins had gone so far as to argue that marriage was “a state in itselfe, farre more excellent, than the condition of a single life” (11), and Rogers had similarly concluded that marriage was properly regarded as “the Preservative of Chastitie” and “the ambition of Virginitie” (7). Calvin went further by pronouncing faithful married love to be a second kind of virginity: Ergo species secunda virginitatis, est matrimonij casta dilectio (IV.xii.28, 312). If, in keeping with this view, virginity is defined not as total abstinence from sexual love but as fidelity to one lawful partner, then Eve can easily and effortlessly combine the roles of virgin and bride. But Milton seems to be attributing a more complex significance to Eve’s virginal presence in the garden than this. Her continuing virginity, even after she is married to Adam, is symbolically suggested in a number of mutually reinforcing ways. At first the parallelism between Eve and the roses of the garden seems straightforward enough: if, in accordance with such traditional floral symbolism, the roses are to be regarded as an objective correlative of Eve’s maidenhood, then, as Lehnof has pointed out, the bushes surrounding the nuptial bower which “flung rose” on the wedding night, seem to be offering up the conventional symbol of virginity, just as Eve is about to surrender her actual virginity (74). However, the roses showered on the sleeping couple “which the Morn repair’d” (IV.772–3) would seem to intimate that after the night’s activities Eve’s hymen is restored, and her virginity renewed. In a very real sense, then, for Adam and Eve every night is their wedding night. If this interpretation seems a little tendentious and an over-reading of a couple of passing descriptive details, it may be as well to remember that when in De Civitate Dei Augustine had speculated about the conditions that would have obtained in the prelapsarian world, he had concluded that, if intercourse had taken place between Adam and Eve – he clearly thought that it had not – tunc potuisse utero coniugis salva integritate feminei genitalis virile semen inmitti, sicut nunc potest eadem integritate salva ex utero virginis fluxus menstruicruoris emitti (“the male seed could then be introduced into the wife’s uterus without damage to her maidenhead even as now the menstrual flow can issue from a maiden’s uterus without any such damage;” XIV.26).

Spenser’s famous exemplar of chastity, Britomart, is sustained by her secure expectation of married love to Artegall. Lehnof has it both ways: on the one hand, that “The roses of the bower ... are undamaged by the evening’s activities” seems to deny “that any defloration has taken place”; on the other, as he goes on to concede, “The fact that the roses must be restored or ‘repair’d’ indicates that the activities in the bower alter or compromise their original condition (as we colloquially claim, there is no need to repair that which is not broken)” (70–71).


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Moreover, Milton’s association of Eve with Proserpina, through the flower metaphor that they both come to share, brings the sexual implications of the recurrent flower motif in Paradise Lost into play and reflects Eve’s loss of innocence after the Fall with greater complexity. That Proserpina’s lost virginity was symbolized by Ovid in the flowers lost in the abrupt translation to the Underworld seems confirmed by the highly charged description of the loss as a virgineum ... dolorem (Met. V.401). Moreover, although the lost Proserpina is not, of course, literally dead, abduction to the Underworld constitutes a powerful metaphor for death and renders Ceres’ lament for her loss all the more elegiac in intensity. Since the narrative sequence leading up to the Fall opens with the most explicit expression of the underlying identification of Eve with the roses that surrounded her, these flowers are naturally involved in Eve’s fall. When Adam discovers Eve “deflourd, and now to Death devote” (IX.901), the garland of roses that withers in his hand, shedding all its faded petals (IX.893), works with unobtrusive efficiency to identify Eve’s condition with the kind of loss suffered by Proserpina. In such a context “deflowered” is double-edged, not only does it powerfully suggest Satan’s successful seduction of Eve (OED Deflower I trans. To deprive (a woman) of her virginity; to violate; ravish), but it also derives additional strength and poignancy from the literal meaning of the original Latin verb deflorescere (to drop blossoms, fade, wither). Unlike Proserpina, however, Eve’s virginity is shed rather than forcibly plucked. III As Eve parts from Adam to garden alone on the fateful morning of the Fall, her virgin state is reiterated with ominous suggestiveness. Eve’s virginity, whether fully real or merely rhetorical, becomes here the chief expression of her innocence, since it is from the imminent encounter with Satan that she will return “deflourd” to Adam. Eve ... like a Wood-Nymph light Oread or Dryad, or of Delia’s Traine, Betook her to the Groves, but Delia’s self In gate surpass’d and Goddess-like deport, Though not as shee with Bow and Quiver armd, But with such Gardning Tools as Art yet rude, Guiltless of fire had formd, or Angels brought. To Pales, or Pomona thus adornd, Likest she seemd, Pomona when she fled Vertumnus, or to Ceres in her Prime, Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove. (IX.386–96)

Pecheux claims that, while “not a virgin in the literal sense at the time of the temptation,” Eve nevertheless enjoys a “spiritual virginity” (361–2).


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Louis Martz has commented on the prevalently Ovidian atmosphere at this point, but claims that the unifying factor amongst these figures is that they are all “attractive, beneficent spirits and deities of nature” (136). In this he concurs with Zachary Pearce, who had commented upon the obvious points of connection between Pales, Pomona and Ceres in his note to the passage. “All three goddesses,” he reflects, were ... like to each other in these circumstances, that they were handsome, that they presided over gardening and cultivation of ground, and that they are usually described by the ancient poets as carrying tools of gardening or husbandry in their hands.

With such comments apparently in mind, Linda Gregerson has sensibly cautioned against discounting the passage as merely decorative, a “pretty tribute to a pretty gardener”; at such an important narrative juncture, Milton is unlikely “to be multiplying pleasant rural analogues here simply because he cannot decide whom Eve at her departure most resembles” (181). Indeed, the simile is weighted with narrative and thematic significance. As so often in Milton’s extended similes, the reader may become aware that the real energy of the lines seems to lurk somewhere alongside or behind what is expressly said. As the simile unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that what the figures share in common is their virgin state; it is particularly notable in connection with Pomona and Ceres, since Milton’s lines openly anticipate its loss in each case, but the mere mention of Proserpina inevitably conjures up a third narrative wherein a maiden in a beautiful setting is surprised by a predatory male god, and sexual violence is offered against a more or less helpless and passive female body. Yet it is at this point that Eve is directly associated with the virgin nymphs of Diana’s band and then with the virgin goddess herself under her alternative name Delia. Eve is likened to the regal Diana whose “stern frown” was “Fear’d” by “gods and men” (Comus 446, 445) in order to emphasize Eve’s “Virgin Majestie” (IX.270) and to help explain Adam’s sudden submission to her will. It is a quality that commands Adam’s respect and deference, and which helps create the “awe / About her, as a guard Angelic plac’t” (VIII.558–9); it is recognized by Satan, too, in her “awful brow, more awful thus retir’d” (IX.537). Indeed as Eve confidently sets out for “the Groves” with “Goddess-like deport” (IX.388–9), we may remember the Elder Brother’s account of the “hidden strength” that chastity imparts to its true adherents: She that has that, is clad in compleat steel, And like a quiver’d Nymph with Arrows keen

Gregerson points out that Pomona does not flee from Vertumnus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but postulates that: “Milton makes her flee so that he may link her to Proserpina as well as to Ceres” (182). However, surprised by Dis’ sudden onslaught, Proserpina is not afforded any opportunity to fly his approach.


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May trace huge Forests, and unharbour’d Heaths, Infamous Hills, and sandy perilous wildes, Where through the sacred rayes of Chastity, No savage fierce, Bandite, or mountaneer Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity. (Comus 421–7)

However, the reader’s response to his confident assumption that “no evil thing” “Hath hurtfull power o’er true virginity” (432, 437) must be qualified by the chastening reflection that the Lady has just left with the disguised Comus, just as Eve, too, will accompany Satan in the guise of a serpent. Indeed, like Comus, Satan will only momentarily be overcome “with sudden adoration, and blank aw” (452) in Eve’s presence. Moreover, the comparison with Diana and her train accentuates another more ambivalent aspect of Eve’s virginal role: her continuing desire for independence. Until after the Fall, the awareness of mutual need is much more acutely experienced by Adam than Eve, but nowhere more crucially than in the discussion leading up to their parting here. After confessing his own sense of being empowered by her presence (IX.309–12), Adam turns to demand of Eve despairingly, Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel When I am present, and thy trial choose With me, best witness of thy Vertue tri’d. (IX.315–17)

Eve’s determination to play an active and independent part in the struggle against Satan is also highlighted as a key motivating factor in the summary to the Argument of Book IX: “Eve loath to be thought not circumspect or firm enough, urges her going apart, the rather desirous to make tryal of her strength.” The reader is invited to view Eve alongside foolishly self-reliant virgin huntresses, like Daphne, who, taken unawares, become themselves the hunted, or Virgil’s doomed warrior-maid, Camilla, fatally betrayed by her reckless and single-minded desire for war’s glittering prizes (Aen. XI.768–867). Satan plays upon Eve’s desire for individual distinction. He presents the eating of the apple as a heroic deed, a death-defying feat by which she will snatch a great destiny for herself and for mankind. Eating the apple is argued to be a sign of active courage, a higher test of virtue than passive obedience and restraint. In this context, we can understand the peculiar force of Satan’s choice of words as he represents the act as a challenge to her “dauntless vertue” (IX.694). This expression seems to draw its strength from the primary signification of the Latin virtus (manliness, manhood, strength, vigour, bravery, courage) rather than the secondary meaning, and more usual English sense (goodness, moral perfection, high character, virtue). However, that such individualistic search for renown exhibited by “adventrous Eve” (IX.921) is a misdirected form of heroism is evident from the way that the false standards of epic masculinity have already been discredited by the actions of Satan, and the glory of martial heroism so effectively extinguished by the war in heaven. Moreover, in the invocation, which prefaces Book IX, Milton makes


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it plain that the inward Christian virtues of patience and obedience should be considered “Not less but more Heroic” than deeds of physical valour (IX.14). Ironically, then, the self-willed assertiveness and determination to confront Satan alone, which Eve has displayed in the gardening debate, may suggest that she is already in the grip of temptation. And it is interesting to note in this connection Augustine’s suggestive observation that, for Eve to have fallen, she must have already had in her mind a certain love of her own power and a certain proud selfpresumption (De Genesi ad Litteram XI.30). The Elder Brother’s warning that the true virgin may pass unmolested through danger with “unblench’t majesty” provided that she did not venture out “in pride, or in presumption” (Comus 430– 431) seems not without significance here, while a still more ironic light is cast upon Eve’s departure when she is seen to lack the “dred bow” of “the huntress Dian,” the “arms of Chastity” (Comus 441, 440). Eve’s situation now seems to resemble that of the Lady as seen through the eyes of her Younger Brother. In direct contrast to the Elder Brother, he sees their sister as defenceless and vulnerable without their supportive presence and protection, and he fears for her safety. Defining the Lady by her beauty rather than her chastity, he cites the familiar Ovidian paradigm in which defenceless beauty invites despoliation10 and the virgin is betrayed by her own desirable body:11 But beauty like the fair Hesperian Tree Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard Of dragon watch with uninchanted eye, To save her blossoms, and defend her fruit From the rash hand of bold Incontinence. (Comus 393–7)

The view that now opens up of Eve, thus weaponless and alone,12 prepares for the diminuendo effect whereby her “Goddess-like deport” becomes the “Nymphlike step” of some “fair Virgin” (IX.452) of the countryside, thereby confirming her mistaken view of herself as a heroic figure.

For a discussion of the way Eve plays a central role in the redefinition of heroism, see Chapter 7. 10 The emphasis on Daphne’s beauty as the cause of her undoing is at the centre of her story (Met. I.488–9); Ovid describes the girl as she appeared in the eyes of her pursuer, with her graceful body made to seem even more desirable by her flight (Met. I.530). 11 In the event, there proves to be some truth in both viewpoints: the erotic power of the Lady’s beauty excites Comus’ admiration, but though he is able to detain her physically against her will, her virtue proves unassailable. 12 Flannagan has commented on the way Adam and Eve’s “ ‘handedness’ (see 4.739) has been an important emblem of their conjugal union” (596, note 123), so Eve’s withdrawal of her hand from Adam’s in the separation scene becomes symbolically significant.


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IV This note of foreboding is further strengthened by her resemblance to the pastoral figure of Pomona, who is specifically described by Ovid as carrying not weapons but gardening tools (Met. XIV.628).13 Martz maintains that this Ovidian reminiscence serves to surround Eve with an “atmosphere of purity and harmlessness” (137), and Charles Martindale similarly notes that by the comparison of Eve with Pomona, Milton, “creates a mood of sweet fruitfulness” (1985, 332), but the allusion is charged with other, more disturbing undertones. Although Martz points out that “Milton has given the allusion an ominous twist by referring to the time when, he says, she ‘fled Vertumnus,’” even in Ovid’s Metamorphoses this is not the “amusing and harmless story” (136) that Martz and others have professed it to be. As the last love-story in the epic, a tale of committed courtship set in the Italian countryside that culminates in an enduring relationship of mutual love, this episode would seem to offer a deliberate contrast with the first tale of erotic desire: the sterilis amor of Apollo and Daphne. Given that attempted rape gives place to amorous consent, this tale has often been read as a joyful affirmation of fruitful married love written by Ovid in support of Augustus’ promotion of marriage and fertility, and thereby intended to win his approval.14 However, darker strands are woven into her tale, not only in Vertumnus’ readiness to abandon shape-shifting and resort to violence to force his will, but by penetrating her orchard – albeit in the innocuous guise of an old woman15 – Vertumnus has already performed a symbolic act of violation which itself foreshadows the closing lines of Pomona’s story. This is not, of course, the first time that Eve has been openly associated with the “Wood-Nymph” Pomona. On Raphael’s arrival in Eden he accompanies Adam “to the Silvan Lodge” which “like Pomona’s Arbour smil’d / With flourets deck’t and fragrant smells” (V.377–9). Likeness gives place to difference as the 13

Ovid’s economic use of the negative formulation in which Pomona is defined against the example of Diana – paralleled, as we have seen, by Milton in his description of Eve – encapsulates the way Pomona’s story provides a variation on the standard pattern of a young woman’s desire for a single life established so far in the Metamorphoses. Unlike the militantly virginal members of Diana’s band who express their rejection of social ties by engaging in solitary hunting pursuits and roaming the wilds, Pomona’s flight from marriage (concubitusque fugis, Met. XIV.668) is figurative rather than literal. She takes refuge in her enclosed garden but, despite being intent upon promoting fruitfulness, her single-minded devotion to fruit-cultivation is at the expense of human love. 14 The moral legislation of 19 BCE rewarded men and women who married and had children and penalised those who remained unmarried and childless. 15 The apparent harmlessness of this disguise is to some extent belied by the way in which the reader has already witnessed predatory male gods assume a female form to gain access to their current amatory interests, most notoriously Jupiter who takes advantage of Callisto in the likeness of Diana herself (Met. II.425).

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two young women are then directly compared to establish Eve’s superior beauty: “Undeck’t, save with her self,” Eve is judged “more lovely fair” than the fair Pomona (V.380–381). While at first this constitutes a straightforward example of the “outdoing” topos – the fairest figures from the classical world were not so fair as Eve – familiar to the reader from Milton’s practice elsewhere in the poem, the narrator goes on to make a more surprising observation. When the naked Eve Stood to entertain her guest from Heav’n; no vaile Shee needed, Vertue-proof, no thought infirme Alterd her cheek. (V.383–5)

Initially, it seems that Milton’s particular purpose here is to stress the ease of this encounter. The innocent but more experienced Eve’s poise and composure in front of the angel is underlined by implicitly evoking in contrast the appropriately modest and shy reception that the newly-created Eve had given to Adam as he led her “blushing like the Morn” to their nuptial bower (VIII.511). So Richard DuRocher, following Alastair Fowler’s lead, glosses “Vertue-proof,” by its primary meaning, “invulnerable through her virtue” (96), but Fowler had immediately qualified this reading by observantly noting that: “the expected meaning on the analogy of other such compounds (e.g., shot-proof) ... must have occurred to M – proof against virtue. Proof, then, against Raphael, the angelic virtue (l. 371)?” This speculation seems pertinent, especially since the reference to Raphael as “the Angelic Vertue” has occurred only a dozen or so lines previously (V.371), and because the use of the compound form in its usual sense is to be found elsewhere in Milton’s early verses (“star-proof,” Arcades 89). Eve’s meeting with Raphael is thus discreetly established as some kind of trial of her chastity, but one which both pass without any discernible difficulty on either side.16 That this is not altogether a wilful misreading of the episode is in part confirmed by the narrator’s exclamation as Eve “Ministerd naked” (V.444) to her husband and their angelic guest ... if ever, then, Then had the Sons of God excuse to have bin Enamour’d at that sight. (V.446–8)

16 Milton’s observation that “Her Husband the Relater she preferr’d / Before the Angel” (VIII.52–3) is perhaps especially revealing in this context. So too, although the narrator specifically notes that as she departed from the discussion on astronomy “Darts of desire” wounded “all Eyes,” wishing for her beautiful naked form to remain “in sight” (VIII.62–3, emphasis added), there seems little evidence to suggest that Raphael shares the general enthusiasm for Eve’s fair outside (VIII.567–8), and this seems not without significance here. While Raphael explains that Angels can change sex at will, the account of heaven he gives to Adam and Eve happens to be peopled exclusively with male spirits. Satan will, of course, exploit this statistic when he insinuates to Eve that she is wasting herself in a monogamous relationship with Adam in Eden.


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Milton’s strategy here, as so often elsewhere, is to suggest the possibility of sinfulness in order to refute it. The narrator’s outburst certainly alludes to the enigmatic opening of the sixth chapter of Genesis: And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. (Gen. VI.1–2)

By indirectly suggesting the possibility of the very thing that he is apparently at pains to deny, Milton ensures that these lines reflect glancingly on Raphael also. Although, on this occasion, the possibility is mentioned only to be immediately rejected, the effect is disquieting and the reader cannot altogether avoid entertaining the possibility of some kind of liaison developing between a son of God and this daughter of man. For while Milton protests that in the hearts of the unfallen, “Love unlibidinous reign’d, nor jealousie / Was understood, the injur’d Lovers Hell” (V.449–50), we have already seen the effects of “fierce desire” and “jealousie” at work within the fallen Satan.17 Voyeuristically observing Adam and Eve embrace, Satan had turned aside: For envie, yet with jealous leer maligne Ey’d them askance, and to himself thus plaind. Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two Imparadis’t in one anothers arms The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir 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 unfulfill’d with pain of longing pines. (IV.503–11)

In his note to XI.621–2, Fowler remarks how early commentators took the opening lines from Genesis VI “to mean that the fallen angels lay with the daughters of men” and that Milton himself “allows us to dally with this surmise in an ambiguous passage at iii 461ff.”18 Although in Book XI this interpretation is exploded by Michael (XI.621–3), at this juncture the mere mention of the myth is calculated to stimulate an undefined foreboding in the reader. Indeed, Martindale has responded to the way in which “throughout Book IX there is a strong hint that 17 As Fletcher has observed, “In some curious manner sexual desire entered into the warfare between good and evil” (184–5). Hutcherson, too, finds here vestiges of rabbinical commentaries which state that “Satan was motivated by his jealousy of Adam’s conjugal relations with Eve” (1960, 20). 18 Augustine too introduces the question in De Civitate Dei, III.5, and revisits it at XV.23. Milton returns to the episode again and plainly gives countenance to this view by stating in Paradise Regained that the Fallen Angels had sexually seduced women in their guise as classical gods (II.174–91).


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Satan is seducing Eve,” adding too, that one of the first consequences of the Fall is “the corruption of innocent sexuality” (1985, 315). Adam himself intuits Satan’s plan “to disturb / Conjugal Love,” fully aware that “perhaps no bliss / Enjoy’d by us excites his envie more” (IX.262–4). Wolfgang Rudat is more outspoken on this point, insisting, “Satan as serpent ... jealously attempts to usurp Adam’s place and seduce Eve, sexually” (1985, 17). It seems clear that Satan rejoices to happen upon “Eve separate” from Adam (IX.422; emphasized again only two lines later at IX.424) on that fateful morning, not only because he would naturally prefer not to come up against Adam’s “higher intellectual” and greater physical strength, “of limb, / Heroic built” (IX.483–5), but also because he palpably relishes the prurient pleasure her beauty affords him: Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of Eve Thus earlie, thus alone. (IX.455–7)

Satan stops short of, in the literal sense, “ravishing” Eve, though Milton deliberately invites us to toy with the possibility during the run up to their encounter, as Satan reflects to his evident satisfaction: “behold alone / The Woman, opportune to all attempts” (IX.480–481). But even if “The scattered hints of Satan’s sexual rivalry for Eve,” detected by Arnold Stein and others, “are never allowed to become more than hints,” they are evidently “deliberate enough”19 and make a vital contribution to the thematic architecture of Eve’s temptation and Fall, the narrative context in which it is placed and the language in which it is couched: the seduction of the virgin Eve discovered alone in her garden by Satan who has imbruted himself into the form of a serpent for this purpose.20 V Ovid is generally accredited with playing a decisive role in fixing the ideal of the locus amoenus for Western literature, but Charles Segal’s perceptive insights have alerted readers to the complex and ambivalent nature of these landscapes that have “the external trappings of pastoral but not the spirit” (1969, 82).21 Ovid imbues his 19

A number of studies in recent years have drawn attention – if only in passing – to the sexual overtones in Satan’s temptation of Eve, for instance: Stein (59); Fletcher (186); Svensden (167–70); Halkett (125); Griffin (265); Blackburn (1971, 128); Northrop Frye (24); Rudat (1980, 17–21), and particularly, Le Comte (78–81). 20 Such a representation of the temptation is not without poetic precedent. Sylvester, for instance, comments on the “fit comparison” of likening Satan to “a false Lover, that thick snares hath laid / T’intrap the honour of a fair young Maid” with “sweet, courting deep-affected words” (Du Bartas, II.i.2.302–3, 305). 21 Interesting light has been cast on the ambivalence of feeling Ovid attaches to nature in the Metamorphoses by this and Parry’s important essay. Martz (229) and Martindale (1985, 315) have also acknowledged the significance of these findings for the light they


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settings with the idyllic quality of the pastoral landscapes of Theocritus and Virgil only to ensure that when destructive violence irrupts into this seemingly inviolable pastoral world, it comes with redoubled force. In such a world, innocence is seldom preserved, and virginity may only be retained, as Daphne and other female victims of male sexual violence discover, at the expense of recognizable human life. The enclosed quality of Pomona’s garden should suggest safety and protection, but when Vertumnus gains admission to her orchard, it serves to heighten our sense of her isolation and helplessness. Milton demonstrates an intuitive understanding of the way Ovid manipulates the narrative topos of the locus amoenus to presage acts of sexual violence. In a strangely proleptic passage, Milton’s Paradise likewise begins to shed its accustomed associations of peace and security in a curious reversal of the reader’s expectations. The following lines ostensibly serve to establish the remote seclusion proper to Adam and Eve’s pastoral retreat as the narrator affirms: In shadier Bower More sacred and sequesterd, though but feignd, Pan or Silvanus never slept, nor Nymph, Nor Faunus haunted. (IV.705–8)

But the very act of naming these rustic deities – even though they are invoked in locations that are then dismissed as being both inferior and false in comparison with Milton’s true account – inevitably brings to mind the rampant sexual energies of the untamed and wild side of nature, and suggest that Milton was thinking of the circumstances of the beleaguered nymph Pomona, her cultivated garden beset on every side by the threat of intrusion from these unwelcome suitors (Met. XIV.635–9). Indeed, such an association seems especially likely given that within a hundred lines of the narrator’s assurances, Satan will have penetrated “thir blissful Bower” (IV.690) and been discovered, “Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve” (IV.800).22 Moreover, the lines in which Ovid describes the enclosed garden where Pomona has shut herself away from the threat of male violence clearly draw with subtlety and economy upon the ancient tradition of the hortus conclusus as a symbol of virginity:

shed on Milton’s own subversion of the pastoral mode. For a different view, see Koehler, who claims that Eden enjoys the “seclusion proper to the pastoral retreat” (6), but, as Knott has recognized, “The elegiac note ... in Paradise Lost, where Eden is rarely seen without ominous shadows, belongs to a more sophisticated kind of pastoral” (1970, 47). 22 McChrystal has suggested that during the dream episode Eve undergoes “a kind of rape as Satan’s words penetrate her thoughts as she sleeps” (502). In a similar vein, Kilgour has remarked how, as Eve wakes from this dream with “ ‘Tresses discompos’d’ (10),” this descriptive detail has “a disturbing classical analogue: in Ovid both the raped Philomela and Lucretia are described with ‘passi capilli’ (see Metamorphoses 6.531 and Fasti 2.813)” (6).


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vim tamen agrestum metuens pomaria claudit23 intus et accessus prohibet refugitque viriles. (Met. XIV.635–6) yet fearing the violence of countrymen, she shut herself up inside her orchard, denied access and fled away from men.

The etymological association of the name Pomona with pomaria, the enclosed orchard, and with poma, the ripe apples ready to be picked,24 encourages the reader to identify the nymph with the garden she tends.25 These erotic connotations are further intensified when, as one of the many disguises Vertumnus assumes in order “To winne accesse” (Sandys) to her presence – so that he may seize the joys of looking at her beauty (ut caperet spectatae gaudia formae, Met. XIV.653) – he appears in the guise of an apple-picker (lecturum poma putares, “you would think him about to gather apples,” Met. XIV.650). Pomona is, in his eyes, equated with the apples ripe for picking (ramos felicia poma ferentes, “branches laden with ripe fruits,” Met. XIV.627), as is clear from his knowing linkage of the two (pomaque mirata est. “tanto” que “potentior!” inquit, “after admiring the apples he said, ‘But you are much more tasty!’” Met. XIV.657). This deepening association of Pomona with her poma strengthens the force of the verbs capere (653) and legere (650): Vertumnus will not remain content with looking; he will pick the fruit. In representing Satan’s assault on Eden and on Eve, Milton draws upon Ovid’s subversion of pastoral values in which the violation of a virginal landscape is deployed to suggest the rape of a female victim. Indeed, such an interplay is first suggested in the manner of Satan’s abrupt entrance into the garden26 just after it has been viewed as a mons Veneris:27 “a rural mound ... / ... whose hairie sides / With 23

Ovid makes ironic play of Pomona’s situation here: both the main narrative, Vertumnus’ pursuit of the wood-nymph, and the cautionary tale of the love of Iphis for Anaxarete embedded within it, are structured in the manner of the paraclausithyron, so familiar from Roman elegy, in which the main focus is on the plight of the excluded lover (exclusus amator) shut outside the door. 24 Apples were a common symbol of erotic love in classical mythology and literature; plucking an apple, like picking a flower, was frequently used to suggest the loss of virginity. (See Littlewood, 147–81.) The penetration of the enclosed garden and the plucking of a flower therein had been brought together as explicit emblems of lost virgin purity by the chorus of young women in a passage from Catullus’ epithalamium (LXII.39–47). 25 Gentilcore has noted how “Through the sexual images of the enclosed garden and ripe apples, Pomona is made synonymous with the landscape” (110). 26 Satan’s evasion of the angelic guard on this occasion, then again on the night of the dream temptation and on the fatal morning of the Fall, help to instil in readers the apprehensive feeling that Eden is similarly bare of protection and “exposed” (cf. IX.340– 341) to sudden attack, even while we acknowledge that Eve is “Secure from outward force” since it is “within” that “The danger lies” (IX.348–9). 27 Le Comte (177). Compare the sexually charged language in Shakespeare’s Ovidian narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, where the goddess invites the youth to imagine himself “a deer” in her “park”: “Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower where the pleasant fountains lie” (233–4).


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thicket overgrown, grottesque and wilde, / Access deni’d” (IV.135–8), and seems particularly telling given that the expression “Access deni’d” had been used by Ovid to describe Pomona’s orchard, accessus prohibet (Met. XIV.636). Landscape and female figure merge again when Satan seeks out the “sweet recess of Eve” (IX.456), reminding the reader of other fatally inviting seductos recessus (Met. XIII.902) and their hapless occupants. But now as the serpent meanders “With tract oblique” (IX.510) towards Eve, Satan’s physical approach is as circuitous as his temptation will be devious. As the unobserved Satan gazes upon Eve busy amongst her flowers, “there is,” as Martindale has pointed out, “a special quality of voyeuristic sensuality about such unseen watching” (1985, 332). Eve shares Pomona’s innocent love of gardening, but just as Pomona is gently reproved for too exclusive a preoccupation with her garden at the expense of human love, Eve, glimpsed alone supporting the rose with the myrtus coniugalis (IX.426–31), forms an ironic “emblem of the dependence of unfallen bliss upon conjugal virtue” as Fowler remarks in his note to the passage. It seems significant too that, as Fowler points out, Eve had been determined to leave Adam for this “pair of plants associated by Ovid with a goddess’ defence of her virtue” (note to IX.216–19). As the roses bush round to veil Eve “in a Cloud of Fragrance” (IX.425), Milton’s subtle use of allusion recalls the incident in the Fasti when Venus is surprised by satyrs: litore siccabat rorantes nuda capillos: viderunt satyri, turba proterva, deam. sensit et opposita texit sua corpore myrto: tuta fuit facto. (Fasti IV.141–4) Naked [Venus] was drying her dripping hair on the shore, when the satyrs, a randy bunch, saw the goddess. She was aware of it, and clothed her body with a screen of myrtle: that done, she was safe.

The unsuspecting Eve, however, will be “mindless” (IX.431) of the “ambush hid among sweet Flours and Shades” (IX.408), just as the unwary Pomona had likewise paid no heed to the warning signs which might otherwise have alerted the nymph to her danger and helped her to penetrate Vertumnus’ imposture: adsimulavit anum cultosque intravit in hortos / pomaque mirata est ... / paucaque laudatae dedit oscula, qualia numquam vera dedisset anus. (“He disguised himself as an old woman and entered the well-kept garden, and he gave the girl he’d complimented a few kisses, the sort no real old woman would ever have given”; Met. XIV.656–9). In Pomona’s defence it should be acknowledged that Ovid repeatedly draws attention to the convincing accuracy of Vertumnus’ string of virtuoso performances, and indeed she has no reason to suspect such calculated deceit.28 Eve, however, has been expressly forewarned to be on her guard lest she be surprised by “Some 28 This is given especial emphasis in Sandys’ translation of Met. XIV.658–9: “Nor did the Virgin knowe, / (So innocent) that old-wives kist not so.”


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specious object by the Foe subornd” (IX.361).29 Moreover, unlike Pomona who is objectified in Ovid’s account and remains silent throughout, Eve readily engages in conversation with the serpent.30 Indeed, on realizing that the serpent has conducted her to the tree of knowledge, she remarks with a witticism very much in the Ovidian manner: their detour has been in vain, “Fruitless to mee, though Fruit be here to excess” (IX.648), she lightly quips.31 Such verbal playfulness on Eve’s part is psychologically revealing: it provides evidence of a mood of “jaunty levity” (Fowler’s phrase) that hints once again that she is unprepared for the momentous significance of this encounter. Sarah Annes Brown has pointed out that Vertumnus’ “most obvious analogue is Adam” (113), and they certainly do share similar tastes in their association with gardens and their produce, and in their life-long commitment to love. Indeed, Vertumnus, in his guise as an old woman, dissociates himself from the common herd of lovers – tacitly rebuking Apollo thereby – by assuring Pomona that: tu primus et ultimus illi / ardor eris (“You will be his first love and his last,” Met. XIV.682–3). Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising if, as DuRocher points out, “Milton nowhere compares Adam to Vertumnus,” given that “the god’s shiftiness” would clearly be “inappropriate to Adam’s stable character” (98), though, by the same token, his protean character undoubtedly makes Vertumnus a perfect figure for Satan.32 There are a number of points of contact between Vertumnus and Satan that encourage further comparison and contrast between the two scenes of seduction that they orchestrate. Vertumnus, as his name suggests, is a master of metamorphosis. While in the Metamorphoses this is not uncommon among male gods in their activities as sexual predators – Jupiter, in particular, undergoes a series of animal 29

Although Eve is perhaps insufficiently wary here, it should be said in her defence that Uriel has already been entirely taken in by one of Satan’s disguises (III.681). Indeed, Milton’s portrayal is certainly a far cry from the flaws and failings attributed to the unfallen Eve in Sylvester’s Du Bartas. Satan deliberately seeks out Eve as: “The part he findes in evident defaults: / Namely, poor Woman, wavering, weak, unwise, / Light, credulous, newslover, giv’n to lies” (Du Bartas, II.i.2.281–3). 30 The correspondence between female silence and chastity is frequently suggested in classical and Renaissance literature: “Because woman’s voice metonymically figures both her essential nature and her sexuality ... silence comes to stand for sexual continence, the closing of the double ‘mouths’ of the feminine body” (Elizabeth Harvey, 130). 31 From the earliest reception of his work, Ovid’s penchant for unseasonable wit was notorious: Ovid’s narcissistic delight in his own cleverness (nimium amator ingenii sui, Inst. Or. X.i.88) exasperated Quintilian, while Dryden took exception to the string of paradoxes attributed to Narcissus as he wasted away: “If this were Wit was this a Time to be witty, when the poor Wretch was in the Agony of Death?” (Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, 1700). To the reader of Paradise Lost, Eve’s verbal play has a more serious purpose and is chillingly ironic. 32 According to Sarah Annes Brown’s reading, Vertumnus has an “instability of reference”: he begins as a “type of Adam” and becomes “a model for Satan” (115).


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transformations to pursue his desires – in Paradise Lost it is only Satan amongst the infernal spirits who manipulates his appearance in order to deceive. Just as Vertumnus dons a succession of disguises appropriate to a rural setting in order to approach Pomona without causing alarm,33 Satan assumes the form of various creatures in the garden so that he can stalk his prey inconspicuously. The final disguise in each case allows them both to address their targets directly. Vertumnus uses the authority of his adopted persona, a motherly old woman, to recommend himself to Pomona as a suitor and to caution her against wasting her life by rejecting love altogether.34 Satan’s possession of the serpent from which apparently issues, “Language of Man pronounc’t / By Tongue of Brute, and human sense exprest” (IX.553–4), allows him to offer seemingly incontrovertible proof to Eve of the powers of the forbidden fruit, and to suggest to her that she is throwing herself away on just one man. Vertumnus speaks as one conversant with the tradition of the Latin love elegy, warning Pomona of the dangers of being too hard of heart; Satan adopts the pose of a Petrarchan lover, flattering his mistress with excessive praise and adulation. But it is Vertumnus’ last bid to win over Pomona that engages with the scene in Milton’s garden in a complexly allusive way: Vertumnus urges the nymph “to thy lover joyne” (“amanti iungere, nymphe”) lest “the rapefull winds” (Sandys) “nascentia ... / poma nec excutiant rapidi florentia venti!” (“scatter your budding fruits as they flower,” Met. XIV.762–4). Once again Vertumnus collapses the distinction between woman and fruit in lines that are edged with ambiguity and sexual innuendo. Vertumnus extends protection to Pomona providing that she accepts his suit, but, at the same time, he intimates that violence, specifically violence of a sexual nature, may issue from her determination to remain stubbornly single. Milton reconfigures these elements to create an emblem of Eve’s situation at this critical juncture in a way that points to the part Adam as well as Satan has played: the fairest flower (Eve), separated from the loving support of her best prop (Adam), has thereby exposed herself to the storm (Satan’s assault). Though Vertumnus’ eloquence ultimately proves ineffectual (Haec ubi nequiquam formas deus aptus in omnes / edidit, “when the god, skilfully adapting himself to all these shapes, had nevertheless pleaded his cause in vain,” Met. XIV.765–6), Satan’s winning words make their way “Into the Heart of Eve” (IX.550). Even though Eve recognizes Satan’s insinuating manner and unctuous compliments as “overpraising” (IX.615), she voluntarily leaves the protective ring of her flowers to follow Satan “Beyond a row of Myrtles” (IX.627). Eve’s decisive “Lead then” (IX.631), as many a reader has remarked, seems ironic coming from 33

It should be noted that unlike Satan, Vertumnus’ disguises “are more costume changes than bodily transformations, and it is significant that the man underneath remains constant, both in his love and in his identity” (Barkan, 82). 34 Pomona’s exclusive concern for her fruits, the real objects of her affection, is perceived as a kind of narcissism in Vertumnus’ eyes. Like Vertumnus, Comus chooses to regard the Lady’s attempt at sexual self-determination as selfishness (Comus 740–743).

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one who has just rejected her husband’s guidance so recently.35 Moreover the full complexity of the irony attached to Milton’s likening of Eve to Pomona at the very moment when she “fled Vertumnus” now becomes apparent. As Milton would have expected his readers to know, Pomona never fled Vertumnus;36 indeed, there was no element of compulsion involved – she simply yielded to him. Pomona stopped to listen to Vertumnus’ addresses,37 but when his eloquence failed to make any impression on the nymph, the god was ready to force her will. In the event, no force proved necessary. As Vertumnus cast off his final disguise, Pomona was “Struck with his beautie” (Sandys), and, in a sudden reversal of expectations, she experienced an answering desire and “Was wounded then as well as he” (Golding XIV.891; Met. XIV.770–771).38 Just as on their first encounter, Eve is once more seen again, “flying from the society of Adam and will not fly (it is a reproach against her) from Vertumnus, the god of autumn and of the Fall”; once again, William Empson has encapsulated the situation in a provocative and evocative manner (1935, 185). Adam and Satan are thus both involved in this Ovidian allusion: it is yet another indication that Satan will try to usurp the position that is rightfully held by Adam. Satan’s supplanting of Adam in the temptation scene that follows is again suggested by mythological imagery. As the Satanic serpent approaches Eve, Milton concedes ... pleasing was his shape, And lovely, never since of Serpent kind Lovelier, not those that in Illyria chang’d Hermione and Cadmus, or the God In Epidaurus; nor to which transformd Ammonian Jove, or Capitoline was seen, Hee with Olympias, this with her who bore Scipio the highth of Rome. (IX.503–10)

35 While the Lady is likewise ready to test the strength of her virtue and follow Comus (Comus 326–30), in the case of Eve we are given no evidence that she is even aware that her trial has begun. 36 As DuRocher points out, Milton “depicts a moment that is not in Ovid’s myth” (98). What should we make of this? Leonard believes that Milton “might have genuinely misremembered the myth because he wants Eve to flee” (112). But given the way that episodes from the Metamorphoses are so ingrained in Milton’s imagination, it seems more likely that the inaccuracy is intentional, and thus a deliberate irony on the poet’s part. Leonard himself discusses other possible instances of this kind (96–121). 37 This is in evident contrast to Daphne, of course, who fled from Apollo, leaving him with his words unfinished (verba inperfecta, Met. I.526). Sylvester had warned of Eve’s danger when Satan engages her in speech, ruefully remarking, the “parley’ng Citie never long resists” (Du Bartas, II.i.2.309). 38 “Hers was not a simple case of rape,” as Knott wryly noted (1971, 119).


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Rudat has remarked how “after first comparing Adam to the impregnating Jupiter, Milton in [this] later simile compares Satan to the father of the gods, namely to the Jupiter who on two occasions had turned into an impregnating serpent” (1980, 17).39 In this passage, Milton has deliberately drawn attention to the ancient tradition, recorded by Sandys, “that sometimes Serpents have beene in love with women, manifesting all the signes of a wanton affection” (424). While Kester Svensden directs us to Camerarius’ The Living Librarie as a reference for Milton’s examples of the amorous inclinations of serpents (169–70), there is another possible source nearer to hand in the passage from Sandys which continues: A Serpent was said to have beene found about Olympia’s bed, that night wherein she conceaved with Alexander; which gave a colour to the claime of his descent from Jupiter. The like the Romans divulged of Scipio Africanus, both reports no doubt but proceeding in part from the Serpents amorous inclination. (424)40

According to Empson’s reading of the simile, the first comparison implies that Eve “turned into a snake and became Satan’s consort”41 and “the last two comparisons treat the Fall as a sexual act” (175). Although Milton deliberately stops short of openly presenting Eve’s fall in this way, Svensden is surely right when he observes that “Satan’s lust has been so established earlier in the poem, and in the tradition, that the inference of sexual sin” at this point “is inescapable” (170), especially bearing in mind that Eve will return “deflourd” (IX.901) to Adam. Indeed, Satan’s bid to supplant Adam was made explicit as early as the dream temptation. Describing her dream to Adam the following morning, Eve had recalled how she mistook the “gentle voice” (V.37) close at her ear for his, and “rose as 39 The explicit linkage of Satan’s deception of Eve, disguised as a beautiful “enamel’d” serpent (IX.525), and Jupiter’s seduction of Olympias and Scipio’s mother in that form, may remind us that, in a less familiar myth recounted by Ovid alone of the Roman poets, Jupiter was likewise alleged to have duped (luserit) Proserpina in the guise of a colourful serpent (varius serpens, Met. VI.114). 40 Bush has noted an interesting Ovid-Sandys connection in the preceding allusion to Hermione and Cadmus (cf. Met. IV.572–603). While Fowler points out that Hermione is “not an Ovidian form” (note to IX.505–10), it is, as Bush has observed, “Sandys’ regular form, in text and commentary” (1932, 282, note 96). 41 Be that as it may, by adopting the Latin form of the name of the young springgoddess (that is Proserpina as opposed to Persephone), Milton is able to presage, as Lord has observed, “the serpentine rhetoric and ‘covert guile’ (II.41)” with which the fallen Eve will manipulate Adam (136). So too when Adam vituperatively denounces Eve after the Fall, exclaiming, “Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best / Befits thee” (X.867– 8), Milton draws upon the patristic tradition recorded in the Protrepticus of Clement of Alexandria that, if Eve is aspirated as Heva, “it is the same as the feminine of serpent” (see Allen, 1959, 682–3), an etymology Milton implicitly rejects elsewhere in favour of the derivation authorized by Genesis that Eve was so called “because she was the mother of all living” (III.20). For further discussion of Eve’s serpentine associations, see Newman (112–15), and Cheung (197–214).


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at thy call, but found thee not” (V.48). Maggie Kilgour has drawn attention to the singularity of this “morning after scene” in which the lover rouses his beloved only to discover that she has been symbolically out on the razzle all night with another man (7). Milton’s reader does not need Sigmund Freud or Erica Jong to grasp the symbolic import of Eve’s exhilarating sensation of flying that follows directly from her imagined tasting of the forbidden fruit. So too, it would take a cloistered mind not to see a hint of sexual double entendre in Ovid’s repeated play upon the identification of Pomona with her fruits, and the association of Vertumnus with the symbolically charged activity of picking fruit, to prefigure the outcome of her story. It has been suggested that “Milton gestures toward theological traditions identifying Eve with the forbidden fruit of Eden” – an exegetical reading in which “Adam sins not by tasting an actual fruit but rather by tasting (carnally) his consort” (Lehnof, 81, note 8). In Milton’s revision of Ovid’s myth, it is Satan rather than Adam whose role is more nearly analogous with that of Vertumnus, and given Milton’s representation of Satan’s temptation of Eve as essentially a sexual seduction, it is not entirely unexpected that Milton offers us a subtly nuanced variation on the predicted pattern, one in which Satan has taken Adam’s place once more. While the dream sequence adumbrates the temptation proper, in one crucial respect, at least, it differs: Eve describes how in the dream her tempter first “pluckt” and “tasted” (V.65) of the forbidden fruit before “Even to my mouth of that same fruit held part / Which he had pluckt” (V.83–4); in the temptation proper the responsibility for this portentous act is entirely Eve’s. At the climactic moment, Eve is so intent upon the fruit, to the exclusion of all else, that the presence of the Satanic serpent has become de trop. In the event, it is the “rash hand” of Eve herself (IX.780) that reaches out to pluck the apple, leaving Satan frustrated of any hopes of obtaining the “pleasure not for him ordain’d” (IX.470). In his moment of triumph Satan is deflated by disappointment.42 VI Eve’s association with the compliant Pomona and her promiscuous readiness to accompany the Serpent begin to cast doubts upon her “solid vertu” (X.884) and force their significance upon details and events that might otherwise have seemed innocent enough. Adam’s own account of how Eve had initially turned from him contains an ironic counterpoint – that he himself seems unaware of – perhaps Eve’s appearance of “Virgin Modestie” (VIII.501) is not so much naïve and artless as coy, calculated and affected.43 For she 42

Rudat contends that in the final moments of his seduction attempt “our poet presents the phallic serpent as suffering a sudden detumescence” (see 1980, note 4). 43 Eve’s blush is read by Adam as an evident sign of his beloved’s natural modesty; however, the praeceptor in the Ars Amatoria suggests that such a blush may in fact signal a woman’s eagerness for sex which she conceals under a pretence of modesty (I.269–82).


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... would be woo’d, and not unsought be won, Not obvious, not obtrusive but retir’d, The more desirable. (VIII.503–5)

In Paradise Regained, “Virgin majesty” (II.159) is merely another ploy to seduce and ensnare the unwary male that the daughters of Eve have since perfected: Skill’d to retire, and in retiring draw Hearts after them tangl’d in Amorous Nets.44 (PR II.161–2)

Moreover, to those familiar with Milton’s early verse, the lines describing Eve’s retreat from Adam’s pursuit, may insinuate a comparison with the half-hearted flight of a mountain nymph from Faunus: Atque aliquam cupidus prædatur Oreada Faunus, Consulit in trepidos dum sibi Nympha pedes, Jamque latet, latitansque cupit male tecta videri, Et fugit, & fugiens pervelit ipsa capi. (El. V.127–30) Lustful Faunus preys upon one of the Oreads [mountain nymphs], while the nymph takes thought for her safety and scurries away on trembling feet. Now she hides, and hopes she does it badly enough to be discovered; and runs away, but hopes to be caught.

With these lines in mind, Eve’s resemblance to “a Wood-Nymph light / Oread or Dryad” (IX.386–7) is troubling and ambiguous. Not only does it suggest Eve’s physical grace, but it also subtly hints at her mental unpreparedness, as well as being, perhaps, an ironic pointer to the moral laxity she may be felt to show in so readily following Satan. In the dream temptation, Satan had clearly attempted to cultivate in Eve a seed of dissatisfaction with Adam, insinuating that his admiration of her was simply not enough (V.44–7). Indeed, after the Fall, recollection of this clearly touches a nerve: with the benefit of hindsight, and in lines heavily charged with resentment, Adam now attributes her desire to part from him on the fateful morning of the Fall to a “longing to be seen / Though by the Devil himself” (X.877–8). Having remarked upon Eve’s close association with Flora, John Knott protested that “we could never suspect Eve of Flora’s wantonness” (1971, 117). However, the cultivation of ambivalent feelings regarding Eve’s moral character that we have seen elsewhere renders her resemblance to Flora a little suspect. Bearing in mind that from ancient times Flora had been regarded as a goddess of dubious moral standards – even Ovid who deliberately softened the association of Flora with sexual promiscuity, still conceded that Flora was not a prim and proper figure 44 In the first elegy, the young Milton had tellingly remarked how when women shake their hair Love spreads his golden nets (tremulosque capillos, / Aurea quæ fallax retia tendit Amor, 59–60).


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like Minerva or Diana (Fasti V.351) – it seems likely that Milton did not intend his reader to filter out such damaging associations altogether, but rather to allow them to form part of his reader’s response to this linkage. Augustine had found occasion to remark upon the sexual licence which customarily marked her festival, qui ludi tanto devotius, quanto turpius celebrari (“these games were held to be the more devoutly conducted the more outrageously they were celebrated,” DCD, II.27), and such a reputation stuck. Patrick Hume, commenting on Milton’s open allusion to Flora early in Book V, saw fit to remind the reader of the tradition that: Flora was a Woman of lascivious Life, who leaving a great mass of money, got by her lewdness, to the City of Rome was honoured with a festival; and to sweeten her Reputation, made Goddess of Flowers. (Note to V.16)

VII By such discreet suggestiveness Milton succeeds in implanting in the reader’s mind shadowy doubts in general about the possibility of combining chastity with sexual desire, Diana with Venus, and of preserving sensuousness without sensuality – even in Eden. Jackson Cope’s belief that throughout his life Milton viewed “sensuality as, if not the chief of sins, at least a source and symbol of most others” (80) seems not without significance here. Moreover, the network of correspondences between Eve and Sin45 and the open allusion to Eve’s “Circean call” (IX.522) may well serve to unsettle the reader’s response still further, since they would seem to provide further evidence of what Davis Harding has called, “a lurking, potentially destructive sensuality in Eve” (1962, 72). Cope has also drawn attention to Milton’s “choice of sexuality as the chief image of evil at crucial points” (80) in the narrative. Indeed, the first sin is, of course, figured through 45

Readers, like Gilbert, have found disquieting the number of doublings of Sin and Eve, the epic’s only two female characters. Sin explains that at her birth she issued out of Satan’s head from the “left side op’ning wide” (II.755); so too, Adam recounts how Eve was formed when God “op’nd my left side, and took / From thence a Rib” (VIII.465–6), and that “wide was the wound” (VIII.467). The negative associations of the left or “sinister” side are first made explicit by Adam when, his vision darkened by the Fall, he attacks Eve for being like the rib from which she had been created: “Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, / More to the part sinister from me drawn” (X.885–6). There are a number of other notable similarities: Sin is Satan’s “perfect image” (II.764), Eve is Adam’s “best image” (V.95); Eve is formed to delight Adam with “sweet attractive grace” (IV.298), while Sin won over Satan “with attractive graces” (II.762). After her metamorphosis, Sin is referred to as the “Snakie Sorceress” (II. 724); following the Fall, Adam calls Eve, “thou Serpent,” and insists that Eve’s hidden nature has been exposed: “nothing wants, but that thy shape, / Like his, and colour Serpentine may shew / Thy inward fraud” (X. 867–71). But whereas Sin is the source of death and suffering, ultimately Eve is “the sourse of life” (XI.169) and regeneration; her alignment with the Son is discussed in more detail in the chapter that follows.


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Satan’s incestuous dalliance with his own daughter Sin and the product of this illicit union, their son Death. The birth of this miscreant is horrific: “breaking violent way,” Death forces a passage and “Tore through [her] entrails” (II.782–3), leaving Sin’s “nether shape” permanently “Transform’d” (II.784–5), so that while she still “seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair,” below the waist, Sin’s distended and distorted body, “ended foul in many a scaly fould / Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’d / With mortal sting (II.650–653). The literary lineage of this “Snakie Sorceress” (II.724) has been traced by a number of critics.46 As well as displaying a strong family resemblance to womanserpents such as Ovid’s Echidna, Spenser’s Error and Fletcher’s Hamartia (the daughter of Satan and Eve), the iconography of Milton’s Sin is most evidently indebted to Ovid’s account of the hideous transformation of Scylla, the pathetic victim of Circe’s lust for Glaucus, as has been remarked previously. In Ovid’s tale, female sexuality is presented through the opposition of two extremes: the reluctant virginal nymph Scylla, as we are introduced to her at the beginning of her story in Book XIII of the Metamorphoses, and the sexually predatory enchantress, Circe. However, the allegorical interpretation offered by both Sandys and Alexander Ross makes Scylla herself the prime culprit for her transformation, which becomes a punishment for sexual sin. Both commentators confer moral culpability onto Scylla herself whose physical metamorphosis becomes an external sign that she has been contaminated by lust; by inciting desire, she has in turn become a danger to others. According to Sandys: Scylla represents a Virgin; who as long as chast in thought, and in body unspotted, appeares of an excellent beauty, attracting all eyes upon her, and wounding the Gods themselves with affection. But once polluted with the sorceries of Circe; that is by bewitching pleasure, she is transformed to an horrid monster. And not so only, but endeavours to shipwracke others (such is the envy of infamous women) upon those ruining rocks, and make them share in the same calamities. That the upper part of her body, is feigned to retaine a humane figure, and the lower to be bestiall; intimates how man, a divine creature, endued with wisdome and intelligence, in whose superiour parts, as in a high tower, that immortall spirit resideth, who only of all that hath life erects his lookes unto heaven, can never so degenerate into a beast, as when he giveth himselfe over to the lowe delights of those baser parts of the body, Dogs and Wolves, the blind and salvage fury of concupiscence. (645)

Ross’ reading runs along similar lines: “Scylla was beautifull in her upper parts, but monstrous and deformed below ... Such is the condition of whoredome, pleasing and delightfull in the beginning but the end is sorrow and miserie” (519). The allegorical history of Scylla’s metamorphosis thus seems to contribute additional

46 See, for example: Gilliam; Patrick; Steadman (1957 and 1961); Fox; O’Keeffe; Fallon; Catherine Gimelli Martin.

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overtones of meaning that substantially support the central metaphorical tendency that we have been pursuing here. From this perspective, Scylla’s metamorphosis, brought about by Circe who had polluted the waters in which she bathed with poisonous potions, brings into play the latter’s more familiar role in the Renaissance mythographic tradition as a “famous enchantresse, who could turne men into beasts ... by making them drink of her charmed cup, and waving her rod over them” (Sandys, 652).47 Unsurprisingly, this myth was regularly used to figure forth the corruption of love into lust. In An Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton had distinguished true love, “whose charming cup is only vertue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy,” from the animal appetites of the herd: “the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating poison, which a certain Sorceress, the abuser of loves name carries about” (Col. 3.305). Citing Comes as his authority, Sandys had elaborated in some detail how the iconic image of Circe and her cup signified the temptation to excess: Lust ... naturally incites to luxury; and getting the dominion, deformes our soules with all bestial vices; alluring some to inordinate Venus; others to anger, cruelty, and every excesse of passion: the Swines, the Lyons, and the Wolves, produced by her sensuall charmes; which are not to bee resisted but by the divine assistance, Moly, the guift of Mercury, which signifies temperance. (654)

In Scylla’s transformation the same thematic configuration is found in a more extreme form. By translating into exclusively sexual terms the metaphorical division between the upper and lower parts of the body, commonly used to embody the conflict between reason and appetite within the individual, it identifies unbridled female sexuality with monstrous bestiality. In this reading, Scylla, once seduced by appetite, becomes in turn a Circean femme fatale who seduces others to their destruction. We shall see how powerfully the interpretative background to this myth feeds into the complex sense we have of Eve at the time of her fall. Of course, Eve’s sin is not, primarily, the result of appetite overcoming reason – though appetite does play a part, as the “hour of Noon” and “the smell / So savourie” that wafts to her from the fruit conspire to awake “An eager appetite” within her (IX.739–41). Eve is more intent upon the “Reason, to her seeming, and with Truth” of the satanic serpent’s “perswasive words” (IX.738, 737). Satan abuses Eve’s reason by basing his argument on the fallacious premise that, on eating the fruit, he, a dumb brute, had been endowed with speech, and with the reasoning powers of man. Eve trusts that the empirical evidence apparently provided by a talking serpent offers incontrovertible proof of Satan’s claim. Were this true, it would be reasonable for Eve to assume that, if she and Adam were to eat the fruit likewise, they would enjoy a proportional ascent and become as gods. It is only once she has sinned that Eve undergoes an internal transformation and 47 In answer to Brodwin’s thesis that “Milton’s primary use of Circe throughout his work follows the Homeric tradition,” Browning has persuasively argued that Milton is more indebted to the Ovidian rather than the Homeric Circean tradition (135).


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becomes like one of the Circean herd, a creature of excessive appetite as “Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint” (IX.791). The mediating figure of Scylla helps establish the link between Sin and the fallen Eve as the presence of “polluting Sin” (X.631) infects all aspects of the human condition. Although Sin’s metamorphosis is an external event – she becomes hideously deformed below the waist – her transformation prefigures the sufferings that are a consequence of sin and the irreversible disfigurement of God’s image that follows upon the first sinful act on earth; Eve returns to Adam “Defac’t” (IX.901) as well as deflowered after her fall. Like Scylla, who seeks to ensnare others and “make them share in the same calamities,” Eve resolves that, “Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe” (IX.831). That Adam too becomes a creature of appetite upon eating the fruit is confirmed by the carnality of his desire for Eve and that of hers for him – a desire which rapidly overtakes them both (IX.1011–15). While Adam succumbs to the Circean charm of the fallen Eve, Satan succumbs to the “Femal charm” (IX.999) of the innocent Eve. Eve’s Circean connection has thus a dual aspect, operating first by way of contrast and then similarity. The overt comparison made between Circe and Eve before the Fall – in the reference to Eve’s superior dominion over “every Beast, more duteous at her call, / Then at Circean call the Herd disguis’d” (IX.521–2) – works rather to establish her innocence at this point than to render her “guilty by association.”48 In a powerful reversal of both Satan’s and the reader’s expectations, coming to seduce, the seducer is himself seduced. With “rapine sweet” (IX.461) and “sweet / Compulsion” (IX.473–4), innocent Beauty ravishes49 the Fallen Angel rather than the other way around. In Milton’s inversion of the Circe myth before the Fall, instead of the transformation of men into beasts by a woman, Satan has deliberately debased himself by turning himself into a beast in order to gain access to Eve. The Fallen Angel is acutely aware of the downward nature of the metamorphosis he undergoes as he takes possession of the snake: O foul descent! that I who erst contended With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime, This essence to incarnate and imbrute. (IX.163–6)

His further degradation before Eve, “Sovran of Creatures, universal Dame” (IX.612), is enacted in the way the “erect” serpent (IX.501) abases himself before 48 Flannagan had posed the question: “whether or not Eve is made guilty here by association” with Circe (159, note 3). Rudat speculates whether Milton links the unfallen Eve with Circe “in order to suggest that, even when she is at her most innocent, there is something inherently Circean, not necessarily about conscious Eve, but about her beauty” (1985, 18). 49 As Forsyth has remarked, “ ‘Rapine” has of course broader connotations than sexual rape, as does the Latin root” (148, note 16), but in this context the overtone is surely a calculated effect.


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her, “Fawning,” he “lick’d the ground whereon she trod” (IX.526). This servile behaviour is calculated to recall the greeting given to their travelling companions by those of Ulysses’ men who had already been transformed into animals by Circe: quin etiam blandas movere per aёra caudas nostraque adulantes comitant vestigia. (Met. XIV.258–9) Why they even wagged their tails in a show of kindness and fawned50 upon us as they followed us along.

It is a sign of Milton’s complexly allusive engagement with the Metamorphoses that Milton’s open association of unfallen Eve with the notorious enchantress Circe functions to the denigration of Satan rather than the disparagement of Eve, but inevitably looks forward to the charms of her fallen descendants, “Bred onely and completed to the taste / Of lustful appetence” (XI.618–19). VIII One may condemn Eve’s determination to confront Satan as hubristic arrogance, a tragic error that stemmed from a misplaced confidence in her own self-sufficiency; one may even detect a measure of complicity and collusion between tempted and tempter. Such readings are, however, complicated by the way in which Milton overlays the Genesis narrative with allusions to two myths of helpless, doomed innocence: Proserpina and Eurydice are both destined to become “Forfeit to Death” (X.304) and their tales of tragic loss collaborate to intensify the impression that Eve is likewise the hapless victim of forces beyond her control.51 50

While it has been suggested that Satan’s “fawning” echoes the scene in Homer where Circe’s victims approached Ulysses’ men like dogs fawning upon a returning master (Od. X.214–19), it is, nevertheless, worth noting that adulantes in Ovid’s account (Met. XIV.259) is translated by both Golding and Sandys as “fawning.” 51 In the Metamorphoses, the rape of Proserpine is represented as a political as well as a sexual act in which the innocent victim and even the perpetrator are pawns in a strategy masterminded by Venus. In a highly significant departure not just from the Homeric Hymn but also from his own alternative version of the myth in the Fasti, Ovid gives a new slant to the story in keeping with its epic context: the rape is motivated by Venus’ ambitious empire-building. Realizing that Proserpina is poised to follow the lead of Pallas and Diana in rebelling against her authority (Met. V.375–7), Venus urges her son Cupid to extend their joint sovereignty to the Underworld: cur non matrisque tuumque / imperium profers? agitur pars tertia mundi! (“Why do you not extend your mother’s empire and your own? The third part of the world is at stake!”; Met. V.371–2). Milton’s representation of the Fall is similarly multilayered, uniting territorial with sexual conquest. Sin, now the dominant partner in her relationship with Death, understands Satan’s seduction of Eve in political terms as an extension of their joint power; no longer confined to their “infernal Empire” (X.389), they have made “one Realm” of “Hell and this World” (X.391–2).


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In Book IX Satan’s assault on Eve is imaged, as we have seen, after the manner of an emblematic conceit: having left Adam’s side to garden alone, Eve, herself the “fairest unsupported Flour,” is discovered “From her best prop so farr, and storm so nigh” (432–3). In a movement of powerful intratextuality, Milton distinctly alludes here to the earlier passage in Book IV where Eve is first implicated in the fate of Proserpina who ... gathering flours, Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis Was gatherd. (IV.269–71)

The identification of Eve with Proserpina – through the flower metaphor that they both now share – invests Eve with the poignancy of the latter’s utter defencelessness. Eve must bend before the relentless onrush of an irresistible external force that she cannot withstand alone, and the association with Proserpina reinforces the sense of inevitability at the impending catastrophe. However, when openly alluding to the fate of Proserpina in Book IV, Milton invites us to share the ironic perspective from which Ovid so frequently regards his virginal characters. Ovid often makes play of the reversal of roles whereby the virgin huntress becomes the hunted. In the same way, Proserpina, the gatherer of flowers, is herself gathered by Dis. Similarly, Milton highlights the tragic irony of Eve’s situation at the point when her fatal encounter with Satan is imminent in Book IX. Absorbed by her self-appointed task of supporting her flowers, she is oblivious to all else, even the precariousness of her own position, “mindless the while / Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour” (IX.431–2). So too Proserpina, engrossed by her desire for picking flowers (carpendi studio, Fasti IV.443), is so intent upon gathering such worthless trophies (praeda ... inanis, Fasti IV.433), that she gradually strays from the protective ring of her companions and thus allows herself to become the prize of Dis.52 More damagingly, Eve, unlike Proserpina, has deliberately put herself at risk, and, moreover, the assault that Eve must withstand is not an attack by a superior physical force. Satan neither abducts Eve nor forces her will. Indeed, he seems rather to have been schooled by Cyane who had vainly reproached the rapist, roganda / non rapienda fuit (“she should have been courted, not carried off,” Met. V.415–16), as he makes off with the helpless and “frighted”53 (territa, Met. V.396), young goddess. Eve is paradoxically both victim and agent of the tragic process. The lines in which Adam laments her loss – “Defac’t, deflourd, and now to Death devote” (IX.901) – make her the victim of an evil external to her, while his second thoughts, 52

Ross points the moral: “Let us take heed, that whilst we are gathering flowers with Proserpina, that is, delighting our selves in these earthly vanities, Pluto the Devill do not take away our soules” (284). 53 Perdita’s choice of expression here (The Winter’s Tale, IV.iv.117), briefly, poignantly and unforgettably conjures up the pathos of Ovid’s representation of the childlike Proserpina.


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as he desperately seeks to understand why she has failed to comply with the one condition imposed upon them, return the responsibility for her actions to Eve herself: Rather how hast thou yeelded to transgress The strict forbiddance, how to violate The sacred Fruit forbidd’n! (IX.902–4)

Curiously too, Proserpina is not only a passive victim but an active, if unwitting, agent of her downfall in Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses. In the Homeric Hymn, it is Hades himself who gives to Persephone the fatal fruit in full knowledge that it will confine her to the Underworld (371–4); in the Metamorphoses the crucial act is the same, but the attendant circumstances have been altered significantly: ... cultis dum simplex errat in hortis, puniceum curva decerpserat arbore pomum. (Met. V.535–6) And while the simple child was wandering in the well-kept gardens, she had plucked a deep-red fruit [pomegranate] from a bending branch.

Ovid brings together the two moments of crisis and sharpens the correspondence between the two events by verbal parallelism: wandering alone in the gardens of the Underworld, Proserpina herself plucks (V.536) a pomegranate from a tree just as thoughtlessly (V.535, 400) as she had plucked (V.392) flowers at Enna; it follows then that the result of this action will prove just as catastrophic. In other ways too, these two lines (535–6) are highly wrought: the first line hints at the symbolism of the hortus conclusus in the positioning of cultis and hortis at either end of the verse, thereby enacting Proserpina’s enclosure within the cultivated gardens, while the portentous nature of the action is impressed upon us by the way the act of picking the fruit (decerpserat) forms the centre of a symmetrically patterned “golden line” where the colourful alliterative phrase puniceum ... pomum54 frames the verse. Just as in the story of Pomona, in Ovid’s account of the rape of Proserpina, “a strong symbolic nexus links the literal culling or harvesting of the earth’s fruits on the one hand, and the sexual defloration or affectively charged death of a virgin on the other,” and, as Hinds has also pointed out, Proserpina’s “loss of her rights to the upper world is represented as a kind of re-enactment of her original abduction ... The suggestion of innocence beguiled by sophistication in Met. 5.535 cultis dum simplex errat in hortis is striking,”55 while “it is Proserpine’s persistence in the simplicitas shown by her in the first crisis that brings about her downfall in the second” (88–9). The Romans called the pomegranate, punicum malum, the “punic apple,” because the bright red colour of the skin and seeds inside resembled the famous purple dye. 55 In his note to this line, Anderson has remarked upon the originality of Ovid’s handling of this part of the story: “other writers do not picture Dis as the owner of a palace or villa beautified by cultivated gardens.” 54


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While the potent sexual symbolism of the lost flowers (Met. V.398–401) and discarded girdle (Met. V.469–70) point to sexual rape, Ceres’ negotiations with Jupiter for the return of their daughter would seem to suggest that Proserpina is still a virgin, as indeed Sandys pointed out (256). Her fate is only sealed when she eats the fruit in Dis’ garden, just as eating the forbidden fruit is the moment of Eve’s deflowering. From a typological perspective, Proserpina’s eating of an “apple” in a garden with no thought for the consequences of her action (Met. V.534–8) has an obvious figural relation to Eve’s plucking and eating of the apple in the garden of Eden, as Sandys’ commentary makes clear. It was, he observes, “a fatall liquorishnesse, which retaines her in Hell; as the Apple thrust Evah out of Paradice, whereunto it is held to have a relation” (256–7). Yet the difference here between Eve and Proserpina remains more significant than the apparent similarity between them: unlike Eve, there is no suggestion that Proserpina understood what was at stake when she ate the fruit, nor that she could have in any way anticipated the repercussions of her action. If Proserpina consigns herself to Hell in ignorance, Eurydice cannot be regarded as even remotely responsible for her own tragedy. In Eurydice’s case, too, life – or release from confinement in the Underworld – is dependent upon abstinence of some kind, but Orpheus’ failure to fulfil the terms of his wife’s conditional release makes her loss final and irremediable. Eurydice is a figure remarkable for her passivity: the responsibility for the taking of her life, its brief restitution before her loss once more, rests entirely elsewhere with others, and she submits to her own fate passively and uncomplainingly (Met. X.60–63). The story of Eurydice, Orpheus’ young bride who dies on her wedding day after being bitten in the heel by a snake, has an obvious affinity with Eve’s. Although no open allusion is to be found in Paradise Lost to Orpheus’ doomed love for Eurydice, the shadowy presence of this archetypal tale of love and premature loss is mediated through two examples of intratextuality. In the moving and deeply personal poem Sonnet XXIII, written while the epic was being composed – Milton’s identification with Orpheus defines the emotional content of the poem.56 The scene in the closing couplet, “But O as to embrace me she enclin’d / I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night” (13–14), despite the partial reversal of roles – for it is his dead wife who would embrace him – inevitably recall Orpheus’ forfeiture of Eurydice as described by Ovid in the Metamorphoses: nec procul abfuerant telluris margine summae: hic, ne deficeret, metuens avidusque videndi flexit amans oculos: et protinus illa relapsa est. bracchiaque intendens prendique et prendere certans nil nisi cedentes infelix adripit auras. (Met. X.55–9)

56 Pearce was one of the first to recognize here “something of the same way of thinking that Milton uses in his Sonnet on his deceas’d wife.” See also Heinzelman (111–26) and Le Comte (40–42).


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They were nearing the threshold of the upper-world: here, fearing that she might slip from him and eager to see her, the lover turned back his gaze; and instantly she fell away. He stretched out his arms, struggling to hold her and to be held, but, luckless man, he grasped nothing but the yielding air.

Significantly, Milton glimpses his wife in a dream-vision, his account beginning: “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint ... ,” while Adam first sees Eve in a similar dream-like state, as he recounts the experience to Raphael, “Abstract as in a transe methought I saw ...” (VIII.462). As reality obtrudes upon sleep, the poet wakes from his dream to suffer an Orpheus-like forfeiture of his wife, while Adam in Paradise famously “awoke and found it truth.”57 Adam reaches out to embrace not an insubstantial evanescent shade or spirit, nor even a watery reflected image, but a tangible reality, “Such as I saw her in my dream” (VIII.482). Yet first Adam has to endure a temporary bereavement which proves surprisingly comparable to that of the poet, and thus indirectly to Orpheus himself.58 Adam movingly conveys his sudden pain and emptiness upon his unexpected loss in these lines: Shee disappeerd, and left me dark, I wak’d To find her, or for ever to deplore Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure. (VIII.478–80)

The imagery and movement of the first line contains audible echoes of the final lines of Sonnet XXIII. Moreover, Adam’s expression of his dramatic decision to deny himself all forms of pleasure that Paradise could offer if Eve were not restored to him, suggests Orpheus’ similar renunciation. The purport of these lines is at first glance perplexing, the pain inflicted gratuitous. Why should Milton, albeit briefly, suggest the possibility of a tragic outcome at this point, overlaying the first marriage with overtones that link it with other marriages that will end in premature separation and death? Milton here tacitly anticipates that critical moment in the poem when Adam, fearing to lose Eve a second time, will risk falling into the hands of death with her rather than endure life without her. If the parallels between Eurydice and Eve serve to emphasize the latter’s ultimate responsibility for actively embracing her fate, the parallels between Orpheus and Adam reflect even more damagingly on Adam. Confronted with an Eve now to “Death devote” (IX.901), Adam contemplates two possible outcomes: he could remain obedient to God’s command and either live on in Paradise alone or with a new wife to replace Eve. Adam dismisses both these alternatives out of hand because he has already experienced the pain of her loss. The only course of action that presents itself to him is to follow her example. He fails to see a further alternative: he might try to intercede with God on her behalf. 57

Keats, Letter to Bailey, 22 November 1817 (1.185). For further discussion of Milton’s use of the Orphic myth in the Fall, see “The katabases of Adam and Eve” (Falconer, 133–60). 58


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Orpheus too is prepared to suffer death to stay with Eurydice, but only if all else fails, and his suit is denied (Met. X.38–9). Certainly, at this crucial juncture, the situation “seemd remediless” (IX.919, emphasis added) to Adam,59 but we can only wonder at what God might have done if Adam had remained unfallen and tried to plead her cause, or even have offered his life for hers, as indeed Eve, in a genuinely heroic gesture, attempts to do, offering to sacrifice herself and shoulder the entire responsibility for their Fall.60 In this way Milton deploys mythic analogues to generate a sense of alternative possibilities that remain unrealized. Like Orpheus, Adam looks back toward the fallen Eve rather than forward to the possibility that she might have been saved. At this point, Adam fails Eve just as, ultimately, Orpheus fails Eurydice.61 As well as recalling the benumbing horror that overtakes Orpheus on discovering Eurydice wrested from him a second time by death (Met. X.64– 7), Adam’s stunned reaction to losing Eve, as he, “Astonied stood and Blank” (IX.890), more closely resembles the way Ceres is struck senseless when she finally learns the truth behind Proserpina’s disappearance: her daughter has been claimed by the Lord of the Underworld as his queen, Mater ad auditas stupuit ceu saxea voces / attonitaeque diu similis fuit (“upon hearing these words, her mother was stricken as though turned to stone, and was for a long time like one thunderstruck”; Met. V.509–10). Especially noteworthy is Milton’s choice of “astonied” which, like attonitae, heads the line in which it appears. In his note to line 890, Douglas Bush offers “dazed” as an equivalent, but since evidence of Milton’s fondness for drawing upon the etymology of Latinate words is so widespread throughout the poem, this gloss seems to depart unnecessarily from the derivation of the word. Besides the obvious relationship with attonitus (hence “thunderstruck”), “astony” was often held to be derived from “stony” and was used “as petrified” (OED). Thus it appears at least possible that through the rich connotative value of “astonied” Milton has economically condensed into one 59 In a closely argued essay, Walker has posed some telling questions about Milton’s use of “seem’d” here (IX.901). If “seem’d” is used by Milton to signify reality at this point, and the situation was indeed remediless, then why didn’t Milton write “was”? (In this crucial line “seem’d” is elided to a single-syllable word and so “was” could easily have been substituted for “seem’d,” thus avoiding any ambiguity.) It is evident, she concludes, that Milton intended “to set up a rival reality” at this point, in which the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit are no longer felt to be utterly irreversible (1986, 15). 60 See Chapter 7 for further discussion of Eve’s pivotal role in ensuring mankind’s reconciliation with God after the Fall. 61 The identification of Orpheus as a pagan type of Christ was commonplace: “What was in vaine attempted by Orpheus, was truly performed by our Saviour, for he alone hath delivered our soules from the nethermost hell” (Ross, 475). The redemptive sacrifice of Christ, freely allowing himself to fall into the power of Death, will “Redeem [them] quite from Deaths rapacious claime” (XI. 258). Christ’s words are of a diviner strain and his harrowing of Hell would have “quite set free” Proserpina and the “half regain’d Eurydice” (L’Allegro, 149–50).


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word both of Ovid’s images for conveying shock to help point the similarity and contrast between the two responses. For Ceres, even though she is similarly astounded when she understands the circumstances of her daughter’s loss, goes straight to Jupiter and as suppliant pleads for Proserpina’s restitution, which is then granted on condition that no food has yet passed her lips (Met. V.514–32). By interceding with Jupiter on behalf of Proserpina, Ceres ensures her daughter’s partial restoration to the upper-world and a mitigation of the severe penalty despite her “fatall liquorishnesse.”62 Once again Milton uses Ovidian myth to intimate an unrealized alternative and invite the reader to speculate about what might have been had Adam attempted to plead on Eve’s behalf. In the event it will of course be the Son’s appeal to the Father, mediating on behalf of the fallen Adam and Eve, that ensures “the bitterness of death / Is past” (XI.157) for them both. As the next chapter will demonstrate in more detail, after the Fall the mythological aura surrounding Eve rapidly dissipates. While the spiritual virginity of innocence can never be repaired, the significance of Milton’s association of Eve with the Ovidian exemplar of faithful married love, “chaste Pyrrha” (XI.12), and his telling choice of epithet at this point, should not be missed. Milton could have hit upon no more fitting way of representing Eve’s reconciliation to Adam and her recovery of God’s favour after she has been deflowered by Satan.

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Ceres’ quest to find her lost daughter had commonly been held to anticipate Christ’s redemptive role. Ross had gone so far as to collapse the disparity between type and antitype by explicitly identifying the two figures: “Christ is truly Ceres; which having lost mankind, being carried away by the devil, he came, and with the Torch of his Word, found him out; ... went down to Hell, and rescued us from thence” (69). A typological connection between Christ and Ceres is first intimated in the shift of attention from Proserpina to her mother in the concluding lines to the simile in Book IV, as we hear how her daughter’s loss “cost Ceres all that pain / To seek her through the world” (IV.271–2), where “all that pain” movingly recalls the metrically equivalent, “all our woe” (I.3). Gransden, however, prefers to read “all that pain” as if it were a dismissive reference to the “fuss about nothing which takes up many hundreds of lines in Metamorphoses V and Fasti IV” (282), but Martindale objects to this reading: “even the most cursory glance at a concordance,” he protests, “will show that ‘all’ is a powerful word in Milton” (1986, 174), and it does seem more likely that Milton is here intent upon exploiting rather than exploding such an emotionally charged Ovidian myth. Ricks draws the line at too exact an equivalence between Ceres and Christ in Milton’s poem, however: “precise correspondence,” he argues, must surely give place “to a looser suggestiveness,” for, he maintains, “Ceres cannot be Christ, in the sense in which Eve is Proserpin; the most obvious thing is that the sexes are wrong, and the correspondence would be intolerable in any case, since Eve is herself later explicitly compared to Ceres” (125). We should perhaps rather allow for differing degrees of correspondence and for the poetic identification of Ceres with Christ to form only one possible level of significance here: whilst Ceres in her mediatory and suffering role is adumbrative of Christ, a more flexible approach would also view her as a pre-figuration of Eve herself who, as we shall see in the chapter that follows, is also assigned a supplicatory, Christ-like role after the Fall.

Chapter 7

“Softening the Stony”: Eve and the Process of Spiritual Regeneration Before the Fall, Eve is a nexus of mythic possibilities. It was appropriate that Ovid should have been the primary source for this mythic substructure because her volatile and constantly shifting identity unsurprisingly draws to itself the shape-shifting imaginative energy of Ovid’s poem. She is both one and many: first the solitary Narcissus, then the reluctant Daphne, hotly pursued; now the softly sensuous mater florum or even Venus herself, queen of the graces. She is both the all-powerful mother goddess Ceres and the frail, vulnerable Proserpina or the doomed Eurydice. As she leaves Adam to garden alone, Eve has the “Virgin Majestie” of Diana, yet she more nearly resembles the independent-spirited but unwary gardener Pomona, armed only with her gardening tools. Although after the Fall Eve is at first shorn of this mythic dimension, she undergoes one final literary metamorphosis: as she repents her sin with Adam, Eve is likened to Deucalion’s pious and virtuous wife, “chaste Pyrrha,” both to confirm her reconciliation to Adam and to symbolize that a process of inward spiritual regeneration has begun. I After the Fall the ambivalence inherent in our perception of Eve and in her relationship to Adam dissolves and with it the strategic use of Ovidian imagery to create such richly ambivalent effects. When the newly fallen pair are discovered awkwardly attempting to conceal their nakedness with a covering of leaves, they more closely resemble the near-naked savages found by Columbus, “girt / With featherd Cincture, naked else and wilde” (IX.1116–17), than the superhuman figures of classical mythology with whom they, but Eve in particular, had been previously aligned. The most immediate effect of this diminution in scale is to demote Adam and Eve from the pre-eminent position they have so far enjoyed above their descendants: “Adam the goodliest man of men since borne / His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve” (IV.323–4). The lines associating the couple with primitive savages seem to reflect more harshly on Eve than Adam: her fall from innocence “seems more complete and more shocking than Adam’s” not only because, as John Knott suggests, “she has been so fully identified with the beauty Without ever alluding directly to the myth, Milton has made the loss of Eurydice a potent presence in the narrative (see Chapter 6).


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of Paradise” (124), but also because she has more nearly united the poles of a paradox as “Goddess humane” (IX.732). “Affecting God-head” (III.206) she loses all pretensions to a “Goddess-like demeanour” or “deport” (VIII.59; IX.389), or even ordinary human dignity. The simile that opens Book XI marks a further significant adjustment of perspective on the fallen couple: ... yet thir port Not of mean suiters, nor important less Seem’d thir Petition, then when th’ancient Pair In Fables old, less ancient yet then these, Deucalion and chaste Pyrrha to restore The Race of Mankind drownd, before the Shrine Of Themis stood devout. (XI.8–14)

Milton alludes openly here to Ovid’s famous account of the renewal of mankind through the intercession of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two remaining human beings left on earth, after Jupiter had purged away the degenerate human race with a great flood. Since this is the first and only time after the Fall that Milton uses a mythological simile to describe not only Eve, but Adam too, its inclusion in such a theologically significant context insists that the comparison carries a great deal of imaginative weight. The passage has been strangely neglected; at best it is customary to acknowledge the singular appropriateness of the parallel and to pass on with little or no further comment. The reactions of the early editors, Thomas Newton and Zachary Pearce, are typical in this respect. While Newton enthusiastically exclaims, “The Poet could not have thought of a more apt Similitude to illustrate his subject and plainly fetch’d it from Ovid’s Met. I.318,” Pearce attempts to answer Richard Bentley’s strictures on the “pat comparison of Deucalion and Pyrrha to our Adam and Eve” by arguing that: “The Case of Deucalion and Pyrrha (as represented by the Heathen Poets) was the only one that in any remarkable Way resembled that of Adam and Eve and therefore the Poet could hardly fail to bring it in by Way of Comparison.” Ovid’s account of mankind’s origins from the first book of the Metamorphoses is important, then, for our discussion here.

Martindale recognized that the passage carried a significance beyond the ostensible point of comparison, but concluded that the effect of the shift in perspective was “to introduce a flavour of ancientness which only rarely surrounds Milton’s voluble and far from primitive Adam and Eve” (1986, 170). No mention of the flood is recorded in Hesiod’s famous account of human origins in the Works and Days. A plain unvarnished summary of the story is provided in Apollodorus’ compilation of Greek myths and heroic legends, The Library (I.vii.2), but Milton’s treatment of the myth is unquestionably indebted to Ovid’s detailed and imaginative account in the first book of the Metamorphoses. (See, for example, Martz, 92; DuRocher, 108; and Sarah Annes Brown, 107–11.)

“Softening the Stony”

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II Classical and Christian traditions both agreed that in the beginning the human race lived in harmony with nature which supplied all of mankind’s wants from her abundant store; wrongdoing and the changes of the season were then unknown. The Roman poets referred to this period of human history as the Golden Age; George Sandys confidently drew the parallel: “this happy estate abounding with all felicities, assuredly represented that which man injoyed in his innocency” (59). Neither state of original human perfection was to endure. The classical myth of the Ages of Mankind implied the progressive degeneration of the human race: “man,” as Sandys explained, “grew not instantly superlative wicked, but degenerated by degrees” (60). The debasement of mankind is marked by the devaluation of the defining metals; thus Ovid chronicles a succession of races declining from the ideal or Golden Age through the Silver and Bronze Age to the baneful Age of Iron. However, in the Metamorphoses the emphasis falls less on the idea of gradual deterioration than on the antithesis between the Ages of Gold and Iron. The age of hard iron came last of all (de duro est ultima ferro): protinus inrupit venae peioris in aevum omne nefas, fugere pudor verumque fidesque. (Met. I.127–9) Straightaway all evil broke out in that age of baser vein: decency, truth and loyalty were put to flight.

With characteristic ruthlessness, Jupiter determines to destroy this obdurately impious race of iron with a universal flood and announces his intention to replace it with another human race of wondrous origin, quite unlike those they were to succeed. Jupiter preserves two human beings, Deucalion and Pyrrha, exceptional in their reverence for the gods, who are to be the instruments of this new, more malleable creation. Once the waters have receded, Deucalion, painfully conscious of their loneliness and isolation, their unique dependence on each other as the sole survivors of a universal calamity, turns to Pyrrha his wife and addresses her through his tears:

In the Works and Days (109–201), Hesiod wrote an influential presentation of five “generations” of humanity: gold, silver, bronze, heroic and iron. The early history of man was thus conceived to be one of progressive decline – interrupted only by the race of heroes who fought in the Theban and Trojan Wars – reaching its furthest point of deterioration in the race of iron, the current generation of mankind. The Roman poets of the Augustan period adopted this view, but spoke of the “Ages” of mankind, and looked towards a renewal of the Golden Age under Augustus (for example, Virgil, Aen. VI.791–4). Ovid, in a significant departure from Hesiod’s account, describes the repopulation of the world by Deucalion and Pyrrha, following the destruction of the Age of Iron by flood. The current age, according to Ovid, is descended from this race created by Deucalion and Pyrrha.

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve “terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus, nos duo turba sumus: [ ... ] nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus (sic visum superis) hominumque exempla manemus.” (Met. I.354–5; 365–6) “Of all the lands which the rising and the setting sun beholds, we two are the crowded populace ... Now the human race rests with the two of us. And (such is the will of Heaven) we alone remain as specimens of mankind.”

In spite of the apparent hopelessness of their situation, they take heart and resolve to pray together for help and guidance: ut templi tetigere gradus, procumbit uterque pronus humi gelidoque pavens dedit oscula saxo, atque ita “si precibus” dixerunt “numina iustis victa remollescunt, si flectitur ira deorum, dic, Themi, qua generis damnum reparabile nostri arte sit, et mersis fer opem, mitissima rebus.” (Met. I.375–80) When they had reached the temple steps, they each fell prostrate upon the ground. Trembling, they kissed the chill stone and said these words: “If overcome by righteous prayers, the powers above soften again, and if the wrath of the gods is turned aside, O Themis, most mild, tell us by what art the loss of our race may be restored, and bring help to a drowned world.”

Faithfully following the instructions of the oracle, Deucalion and Pyrrha both throw stones behind them and, by a miraculous transformation of hard stone softening to flesh, those cast by Deucalion become men, whilst those cast by Pyrrha become women, and the world is re-populated once more: saxa (quis hoc credat, nisi sit pro teste vetustas!) ponere duritiem coepere suumque rigorem mollirique mora mollitaque ducere formam. mox ubi creverunt naturaque mitior illis contigit, ut quaedam, sic non manifesta videri forma potest hominis, sed, uti de marmore coepta, non exacta satis rudibusque simillima signis. quae tamen ex illis aliquo pars umida suco et terrena fuit, versa est in corporis usum; quod solidum est flectique nequit, mutatur in ossa; [ ... ] inque brevi spatio superorum numine saxa missa viri manibus faciem traxere virorum, et de femineo reparata est femina iactu. (Met. I.400–409; 411–13) And the stones – who would believe it except that ancient tradition bears witness to it? – began to put aside their


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hardness and stiffness, and to grow soft slowly, and once softened assume a shape. Soon when they had grown and a milder nature had touched them, a certain resemblance to the human form could be seen, though not clearly, but such as statues just begun out of marble have, a rough approximation, not a distinct likeness. That part of them that was earthy and damp with a trace of moisture was turned into flesh; but what was solid and could not be bent was changed to bone ... And in a short space of time, by the power of the heavens, the stones thrown by the man’s hand took on the face of men and those thrown by the woman were reshaped as women.

Hence, Ovid concludes, comes the hardiness of our race and our endurance of hard work; in this we give proof of the origin of our species: inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum / et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati (Met. I.414–15). There are a number of obvious parallels between Ovid’s account and the scene in Paradise Lost; Wayne Shumaker has helpfully summarized how the comparison openly operates on a number of mutually reinforcing levels: “As visual image the comparison is relevant because Deucalion and Pyrrha are [like Adam and Eve] the sole human figures in the landscape, because each pair has prostrated itself, and because the attitude of each bespeaks entreaty.” Another related point of contact, he observes, is that Adam and Eve like the Ovidian couple “also pray in a ruined world” and “their prayer also effects a kind of restoration” (199–200). The Ovidian allusion also effects a restoration of a different kind, as Adam and Eve’s dignity is restored to them through the comparison. Ovid introduces us to Deucalion and Pyrrha after their little boat has run aground on Mount Parnassus. Sandys describes the situation thus: The desolate Earth now emergent, distressed Deucalion and Pyrrha, purging themselves with the holywater of Cephisus (an ancient custome among the Pagans) repaire to the temple of Themis; with prostrated bodyes and humble soules presenting their prayers to the Goddesse. (69)

At this point, then, their characterization rests solely on their strong piety:

While Apollodorus’ account seems prompted more by the etymology that lies behind the aetiology (laas, the Greek word for stone is very like the word for people, laos), Ovid encourages his readers to recognize themselves in this newly created race. For Milton this aetiological aspect suggests the inflexibility and hard-heartedness that characterizes humanity after the Fall without the softening action of divine grace. DuRocher also notes how “their prayer calls for the same mollification and restoration as do Milton’s characters” (108), but he does not pursue this suggestive observation. There are distinctly audible echoes of Sandys’ commentary in the passage from Paradise Lost that follows. Note the sequence: repaire / repairing; prostrated / prostrate; humble / humbly.

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve non illo melior quisquam nec amantior aequi vir fuit aut illa metuentior ulla deorum. (Met. I.322–3) No man was better than he, none loved justice more, nor was any woman more in awe of the gods than she.

They are described by Ovid as being: innocuos ambo, cultores numinis ambo (“both innocent and both worshippers of God,” Met. I.327), and they are first seen at prayer. As Milton’s penitent couple act on Adam’s recommendation to Eve, they appear in the likeness of Deucalion and Pyrrha who had likewise fallen to prayer in a ruined world: What better can we do, then to the place Repairing where he judg’d us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground. (X.1086–90)

It is with fine irony that Milton grants Adam and Eve their most innocent moment, from the standpoint of mythological analogy at least, after they have fallen. Through their association with Ovid’s pious suppliants, fallen Adam and Eve become imbued with the purity, humility and faith that so strongly feature in Ovid’s portrayal of Deucalion and Pyrrha. In this way Milton’s humble and penitent Adam and Eve regain a measure of their lost stature, albeit on a more modest human scale. Moreover, their resemblance to Deucalion and Pyrrha at this pivotal point confirms the renewal of their marriage after the divisive experience of the Fall and its aftermath. As we have seen, Eve’s yielding to Satan is a kind of sexual betrayal of Adam so her likeness at this point to chaste Pyrrha (XI.12) seems particularly telling. The flicker of ambivalence that so often plays around Eve’s previous mythological personations is noticeably absent here. In this final Ovidian figuration the energy of the comparison works unequivocally to identify Eve with a figure of exemplary domestic virtue and thereby to recover a relationship of marital fidelity to Adam. By likening Eve to Pyrrha, Milton points to the change in Eve herself: her loss of active, independent power and her new-found submissiveness and humility. After the Fall Eve becomes more fully defined by her relationship to Adam, and, like Pyrrha, she is a model wife, “Soft, modest, meek, demure” (SA 1036). As a natural corollary of Eve’s more passive and unassuming role, Adam and Eve no longer feel what Webber has called “the strain of their twoness” (14). Their resemblance to the Ovidian couple also works to accentuate the closeness of their marital relationship, each being the other’s only available companion in the midst of complete devastation. But if outwardly the simile works to restore Incidentally, this interpretation answers Bentley’s reproof, “Why yet? As if something had preceded that was diminishing of them” (note to XI.8).


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their dignity and marital harmony, inwardly and metaphorically it establishes their spiritual regeneration, and it is with the crucial part that Eve plays in bringing about their spiritual regeneration that I will be principally concerned. III Following Joseph Summers’ lead, it is now generally recognized that the reconciliation between man and woman is in some sense a “prologue and type of the ensuing reconciliation between man and God” (176). However, the significant way in which the verbal and thematic correspondences between the two scenes are supported and enriched by Milton’s highly original use of this Ovidian myth has not yet been fully explored. While a satisfactory reading of the two scenes does not require the reader to recognize the part Ovidian myth plays here, nevertheless such recognition heightens an awareness of the way the reverberations of certain key words draw attention to an underlying metaphorical complex. In his sensitive account of Ovid’s rendering of this myth, Hermann Frankel traced a pattern of significant repetitions that point toward the deeper significance running below the sequence of events that leads to the re-creation of the human race. Before Deucalion and Pyrrha cause the stone of Mother Earth to soften and bend (Met. I.400–402), they kneel down and pray that the anger of the gods may soften and bend (Met. I.377–8). The ideas, indeed the very words, repeat themselves in a pattern of converging significance until, as Frankel has demonstrated, “by this subtle device Ovid ties up the yielding mercy of the relenting (mitissima 380) gods with the yielding and relenting (mitior natura 403) of the elements when the merciful miracle is performed and mankind is revived from its merited destruction” (77). The piety of the loving couple prevails over both obdurate anger and obdurate matter. In the world of the Metamorphoses there is little difference between mental and physical hardness;10 Milton extends this analogy to make the spiritual condition of the fallen, and the incipient effects of regeneration, immediately apprehensible. That this is not merely a casual turn of expression on Milton’s part, nor a single random similarity between the two texts, is reinforced by the way in which the pattern repeats itself: in Paradise Lost, as in the Metamorphoses, the earthly and heavenly planes of the action are drawn together in one transcendent movement. In the two scenes of reconciliation – between Eve and Adam, and then between mankind and God – Milton contrives a comparable effect, using words with a

These operative words “remollescunt” (from remollescere, I Lit., to become soft again, grow soft, soften; II Fig. B., to be moved, influenced) and “flectitur” (from flectere, I Lit., to bend, turn; III Fig. B. Esp. of opinion or will, to bend, prevail upon, soften, appease) appear first in line 378 but are then echoed in line 402 in the related forms molliri and mollita (from mollior I Lit., to make soft, soften) and in line 409 by “flecti.” 10 See, for instance, Met. X.242, where the Propoetides are in rigidum parvo silicem discrimine versae (“turned into hard stone with little difference”).

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similar unobtrusive energy that vibrate together and recall the Ovidian account by their very phrasing. As Eve sues for Adam’s forgiveness (X.863ff), the violence of his response reveals that he is still obdurately unregenerate at this point.11 Eve’s “Soft words” (865) and her Tears (910, 937) move Adam, who has turned from her in anger (909), to relent (940). Her soft words taken together with her tears12 gently insist that we become aware of, and respond to, the literal meaning of relent, derived from its Latin root (re + lentare, to make flexible, to bend, to become soft again). Adam’s bitter questioning of divine providence: O why did God, Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n With Spirits Masculine, create at last This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With Men as Angels without Feminine … (X.888–93)

is now answered and what seemed to him faulty in God’s design is fully revealed.13 Paradoxically, Eve’s softness, the very quality that apparently renders her sex the “infirmer” (X.956) and “weaker” (IX.383) of the two, more yielding and more easily swayed – and therefore perhaps more vulnerable to the temptations of Satan – seems to make her in turn more readily receptive to the mollifying effects of Prevenient Grace (XI.3–4),14 which works through Eve’s tears and soft words 11 As Doerksen has pointed out: “It is highly ironic (and surely part of the poet’s – or poem’s – intent) that Eve takes the heroic initiative immediately after the most misogynist[ic] comments in the whole poem, spoken by an unrepentant Adam” (126). 12 The action of water upon stone yielded a sententia familiar both from the Bible (for instance, Job XIV.19) and the Classics (for example, Lucretius, De Rer. Nat. IV.1286– 7), and to be found in contemporary proverbial expressions such as “Constant dropping wears the stone” (The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs), 141. Its obvious figurative application was equally commonplace, as Shakespeare’s line, “Her tears will pierce into a marble heart” (King Henry VI, Part 3, III.i.38), adequately testifies. 13 Norford also “wonders with Adam why God created the female”: although created “essentially good,” he maintains that she is “peculiarly liable to be ‘depraved from good’ ” (1975, 33). Like Adam, Norford is answered here. It is worth remembering that Ovid avoids mention of the misogynistic myth of Pandora, created to be a scourge for mankind; instead Pyrrha, the first woman to appear in Ovid’s epic, is an exemplary wife, devout and devoted to her husband who is equally devoted to her. 14 Bearing in mind Eve’s evaluative judgement of how, “beauty is excelld by manly grace” (IV.490), Marjara has maintained that “Grace, according to Milton, may be a peculiar quality of the male when compared with the female,” reflecting the “Renaissance belief in the superiority of the male” (51). However, as Shullenberger rightly contends, though grace is a gender-based strength, it is one that inheres in Eve rather than Adam (1986, 76). Although the presentation of Adam and Eve is of a different cast in the accompanying poem,


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to soften “The stonie” (XI.4) in Adam’s heart.15 Conversely, Adam, once fallen, seems more susceptible to the hardening of the heart16 or spiritual petrification that afflicts Satan.17 IV In the first sighting of the first man and woman, it is their similarity that first draws notice: they are both seen to be “Lords of all” (IV.290), sharing “in thir looks Divine / The image of thir glorious Maker” (IV.291–2). Only then, when their likeness has been established, are the two sexes carefully distinguished from one another. In this unequivocal statement of gender difference, masculine and feminine qualities are seen to be essentially and properly distinct: ... though both Not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd; For contemplation hee and valour formd, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace. (IV.295–8)

A differentiation of the sexes along these lines is, of course, a commonplace of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought.18 It is the unquestioned assumption in the dedicatory epistle to The State of Innocence (1674), Dryden extols Eve’s spiritual superiority in terms that seem significant for the discussion here: “Moral perfections are rais’d higher ... in the softer Sex; as if Men were of too course a mould for Heaven to work on, and that the Image of Divinity could not be cast to likeness in so harsh a Metall” (A3). 15 It seems interesting to recall in passing the power possessed by water in Comus: some “Drops” from Sabrina’s “fountain pure” (913) “thaw the numbing spell” (853) which had kept the Lady “In stony fetters fixt” (819). 16 The softening of stone into flesh constitutes two of the most famous metamorphoses in Ovid’s poem: mid-way through their miraculous transformation, the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha resemble half-finished statues (Met. I.404–6); in the same way Pygmalion’s ivory statue also softens into flesh (Met. X.283–6). However, on more than one occasion, Ovid describes the same process operating in reverse. So the Propoetides – whose behaviour had so repelled Pygmalion that he had eschewed real women and resorted to creating his fantasy woman in the first place (Met. X.238–49) – harden into stone and, since Venus hates such hardness of heart (Met. XIV.693), we also hear the cautionary tale of Anaxarete whose stony nature eventually took possession of her body, exposing what had been in her heart all along (Met. XIV.757–8). 17 Seelig has the measure of Adam at this point, drawing the parallel with Satan, she observes: “one thing is clear: Adam will accept no part of the blame himself. Upright, arrogant, and self-righteous, his attitude is ominously reminiscent of Satan’s ... Whatever measure of perverse satisfaction Adam’s stony uprightness may give him, it is ultimately vain and fruitless, for he, like Eve, has sinned and must beg forgiveness” (78). 18 Of course, such defining characteristics ascribed to the sexes predate this period, and are very ancient. Alison Keith cites Varro (apud Lact Opif 12.17), who “had derived mulier (‘woman, wife’) from mollis (‘soft’)” (219, note 30).

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behind York’s denunciation of Queen Margaret; his words betray a horrified realization that while she is “seen to bear a woman’s face” her actions deny her sex: “Woman are soft, mild, pitiful and flexible; / Thou sterne, obdurate, flintie, rough, remorseless” (King Henry VI, Part 3, I.iv.140–142). It explicitly underlies William Whately’s emphatic strictures on the hierarchical nature of the relationship between the sexes, which are firmly placed in a relationship of lesser to greater, inferior to superior, as he exhorts wives to be mindful of their “peculiar duties” to their husbands: Whosoever therefore doth desire or purpose to bee a good wife, or to live comfortably, let her set downe this conclusion within her soule: Mine husband is my superiour, my better: he hath authoritie and rule over me, nature hath giuen it to him, hauing framed our bodies to tendernesse, mens to more hardnesse. (189)

Whatley’s pronouncements illustrate how the construction of identity – that is, definitions of the self, of gender and of the individual’s role and function in society – depended upon basic conceptions of the body as soft or hard. In spite of the similar, clear-cut formulation of gender designation laid down by Milton in his first description of the human pair, what he repeatedly presents us with in the dramatization of the relationship between the sexes in Eden is something much less rigid and formulaic. Both the human complexity of Adam and Eve and the dynamic nature of their mutually affective relationship prevent either of them from neatly meeting or fully reversing this gender stereotyping and, while gender distinctions are never safely elided, neither are they pressed home as much as we might expect from the unambiguous assertion of sexual difference given above. That the difference between the sexes is perhaps more helpfully regarded as one of degree than kind is ironically suggested by both Eve and Adam: she acknowledges her initial disappointment at finding Adam “Less winning soft, less amiablie milde” (IV.479, emphasis added) than herself, while Adam in turn explains how from the moment of Eve’s creation his masculinity was tempered by her softening presence, infusing “Sweetness into [his] heart, Unfelt before” (VIII.475).19 So, by the same token, it is Eve who first engages Adam in cosmographical speculation (IV.657–8)20 and it is Eve who is determined “to make tryal of her strength” (Argument to Book IX) and prove her “dauntless vertue” (IX.694) against Satan. In this way, Milton repeatedly unsettles the rigid binary of gender identity that his text habitually affirms. “Softness and sweet attractive 19 Women were held to show a predisposition towards tears and emotion; note the revealing emphasis in the narrator’s comments at XI.494–8 when Adam is moved to tears, “Though not of Woman born,” on confronting the many faces of death his descendants will face. (Compare Lucretius, De Rer. Nat. V.1012–14 and Ovid, Ars Am. II.473–7, where both poets maintain that primitive man’s original hardness had to be softened before human society could evolve.) 20 Duran has drawn attention to how closely “Eve’s question corresponds with the series of questions that Newton posits about the stars in his Opticks” (189).


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grace” may be pre-eminently feminine qualities, just as “contemplation and valour” may be pre-eminently masculine qualities, but they are neither exclusively feminine nor masculine attributes.21 Indeed before the Fall they are generally seen as complementary rather than opposing human qualities.22 This said, it remains undoubtedly true that too much softness in Adam23 and too much hardness in Eve are seen to be particularly threatening to the proper equilibrium in their relationship. Adam’s sudden yielding in the gardening debate is tellingly counter-pointed by the firm, measured movement of the narrator’s comment, “So spake the Patriarch of Mankinde” (IX.376), which, as we have seen, ironically implies Adam’s rightful leadership at the very moment that he abdicates his authority, and by what follows: the jagged rhythm created by the successive qualifications, “but Eve / Persisted, yet submiss, though last, repli’d” (IX.376–7), enacts mimetically the opposing forces ominously at work in Eve. “She is,” as Christopher Ricks astutely observes, “stubborn but sweet ... obdurate but soft” (89–90). This is even more easily exemplified after the Fall when such forces are thrown out of balance completely.24 Accordingly, in his judgement of the fallen pair, the Son explicitly charges Adam with allowing himself to be unmanned by Eve, “Thou did’st resigne thy Manhood” (X.148), he observes reproachfully, while Michael also attributes man’s continuing propensity to fall to his “effeminate slackness” (XI.634), a revealing emphasis which seems to draw upon the negative connotations of mollescere (II Fig B To become effeminate, grow unmanly). James Turner has made an observation that seems particularly suggestive in this context. He remarks how “Milton’s divorce writings share with many of his contemporaries a disturbing sense of sexuality as metamorphosis, a change of state into ‘something beneath man’, a slackening or softening into effeminacy”;25 21 McColley has challenged the reader to consider whether “their bodily forms limit Adam to contemplation and valour and Eve to softness and grace,” or whether these are not rather “talents to be shared” (1983, 41). 22 Tennyson’s poem, “On One Who Affected an Effeminate Manner” provides an interesting gloss on the way each sex should ideally partake of each other’s special qualities without blurring gender boundaries. In his edition of Tennyson’s poems, Ricks includes this useful jotting from a late notebook of Tennyson, “Men should be androgynous and women gynandrous, but men should not be gynandrous nor women androgynous.” 23 Elsewhere Milton had insisted that “sometime slackning the cords of intense thought and labour” was divinely sanctioned as part of the “peculiar comfort” offered by “the married state” (Tetrachordon, Col. 4.85). Adam has to ensure that the “slackness” proper to marriage does not degenerate into “effeminate slackness” (XI.634). 24 Consider Samson Agonistes 406–19, and also line 534, where Samson describes himself as “Soften’d with pleasure and voluptuous life” (emphasis added); and see Paradise Regained II.153–68 where a less positive view is given of the power of women “to soft’n and tame / Severest temper.” 25 The sexual applications of this are, of course, obvious enough; Sharrock spells it out: “A man, to be a man, must be durus (hard), but love (for which he needs to be durus) will make him (mollis) soft” (2002, 97).


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accordingly it was felt that the “male identity must be preserved all the more vigilantly because it could easily deliquesce into the female, ‘the effeminate’” (225–6). The unhappy fate of Hermaphroditus in the Metamorphoses was a cautionary case in point. Finding himself so reduced upon Salmacis’ rapacious embrace, Hermaphroditus had bitterly prayed that others might suffer likewise: “quisquis in hos fontes vir venerit, exeat inde semivir et tactis subito mollescat26 in undis.” (Met. IV.385–6) Whoever comes into this pool as man may he leave a half-man, may he suddenly soften at the touch of the water.

In the fallen world the feminine principle, with its values of “softness and sweet attractive grace,” becomes a powerful force that threatens to ensnare and emasculate the “manliest, resolutest brest” (PR II.167). “A Beavie of fair Women” singing “Soft amorous Ditties” (XI.582, 584) succeed in ensnaring “that sober Race of Men” (XI.621), the descendants of Seth. These beautiful but corruptly sophisticated daughters of Eve have inherited only her softness and beauty and are: Bred onely and completed to the taste Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance, To dress, and troule the Tongue, and roule the Eye. (XI.618–20)

A comparison of “these fair Atheists” (XI.625) with Eve herself in all her rich complexity highlights the difference. In the state of innocence, Eve is able to unite wifely virtues concerned with household good – here described as “Womans domestic honour and chief praise” (XI.617) – with the graces of Venus, and to attend to her garden without seeming in any way primitive or rustica.27 The masculine principle of “contemplation and valour,” in contrast, is rapidly entrapped in “wandring thoughts, and notions vain” (VIII.187) and degenerates into a military ethic of “Valour and Heroic Vertu” (XI.690) – the principal exponent of both of these debased masculine values being, of course, Satan himself. In the fallen world man is at risk from a two-pronged attack: he may soften into effeminacy or harden into obduracy and no trace remains of the possibility that “hard” and “soft” may be complementary rather than opposing valences.

26

Salmacis’ environment reflects her nature: she is to be found habitually reclining, mollibus aut foliis aut mollibus ... herbis (“on soft leaves or the soft grass,” Met. IV.314; emphasis added). 27 A peculiarly Ovidian reproach: see Amores III.x.17–18, where Ovid explains that however much Ceres loves her fruitful fields she could never be thought of as rustica.


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V During the intervening period between the Son’s pronouncement of judgement upon the fallen pair, on the one hand, and Eve’s attempt to effect a reconciliation with Adam, on the other, the narrative gaze is turned upon Adam exclusively, and we witness his inability to resist alone the downward pull of death and despair as he spends the lonely hours of isolation in over-intellectualizing the ways of God to man. In the lengthy lament that only concludes with Eve’s approach, Adam seems poised on the brink of despair, a hairsbreadth away from the Satanic logic of “All hope excluded thus [...] all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good” (IV.105; 109–10). Indeed, Adam has begun to re-enact this drama of despair and damnation. Believing himself “miserable / Beyond all past example and future, / To Satan, only like both crime and doom” (X.839–41), Adam shares Satan’s conviction of the absolute finality of his loss.28 Satan’s dilemma, “Me miserable! which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire” (IV.73–4), is Adam’s also. His horrified realization that “in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatning to devour me opens wide” (IV.76–7) is matched by Adam’s consciousness of an “Abyss of fears / And horrors” “ out of which” he can “find no way, from deep to deeper plung’d!” (X.842–4). Adam struggles to understand the workings of divine justice, but ratiocination is no guide here, leading him in wearisome circles, back always to the abyss, his despairing conviction of his own culpability and the justice of God’s claims upon him. He cannot begin even to conceive of forgiveness: Him after all Disputes Forc’t I absolve: all my evasions vain, And reasonings, though through Mazes,29 lead me still But to my own conviction: first and last On mee, mee onely, as the sourse and spring Of all corruption, all the blame lights due. (X.828–33)

The involutions of self-criticism which redoubles upon itself but finally leads nowhere are thus traced with fine precision by Milton here: the resonant repetition of “On mee, mee onely,” looks back to the Son’s words at III.236–7, and forward to Eve’s at X.935–6 to point the difference here: Adam fails to “act on this impulse” 28

Adam is of course mistaken here; for God has ordained that “Man ... shall find grace / The other none,” because Satan fell, “Self-tempted, self-deprav’d” (III.130, 131–2); it is interesting to note that while the fallen angels speculate about the possibility of God relenting, they are unable to conceive of relenting themselves (II.237–43). 29 As is commonly observed, these lines seem to point to Adam’s resemblance to the fallen angels, those who “reason’d high / Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, / Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute, / And found no end, in wandring mazes lost” (II.558–61). However, these lines also ironically recall how Adam, guided by Raphael, had already been released from a labyrinth of idle speculation (VIII.182–9); contemplation would seem to have its own dangerous propensities.


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(Doerksen, 126). To find the way out of this tortuous, twisting maze clearly lies beyond the reach of reason alone. The mind can go no further and is doomed to circle endlessly round. While Adam falsely assumes a simple equivalence between his sin and that of Satan, his exclusive concern with the exactions of divine justice and his preoccupation with God’s role as punisher of his offence blind him to the possibility of divine grace and pardon, rendering him incapable at this point of recognizing tokens of divine mercy shown in the Son’s judgement.30 Sealed within his own appalled sense of self-judgement, Adam is trapped like Narcissus, not in the physical reflections of beauty, but in the abstract reflections of the mind, of guilt and despair. Staring into his own emptiness, fruitlessly embracing his guilt, Adam would, like Narcissus, have wasted away to nothing. But just as Eve was jolted out of her natal self-absorption by her unseen Maker, so – in a finely executed recursive loop – she becomes Adam’s guide out of the abyss of self. Eve’s offer of self-sacrifice is not a self-indulgent gesture of guilt; like the Son, she offers her life out of love: ... to the place of judgment [I] will return, There with my cries importune Heaven, that all The sentence from thy head remov’d may light On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, Mee mee onely just object of his ire. 31 (X.932–6)

Her selfless wish to suffer for Adam releases him from the endless, downward spiral of bitterness and despair. In his popular conduct book, Of Domesticall Duties, William Gouge had conceded that he found only “a small inequalitie ... betwixt the husband and the wife,” and went on to argue the complementary nature of the sexes and their interdependence by the synecdochal relationship of head and heart: Though the man be as the head, yet is the woman as the heart, which is the most excellent part of the body next the head, farre more excellent than any other member under the head, and almost equall to the head in many respects, and as necessary as the head. (Treatise 3, Duties of Wives, 271) Compare De Doctrina Christiana I.19 (Col. 15.378), where Milton explains how sensu divinæ misericordiæ” (“through a

30

the regenerate man only turns to God, “ex sense of the divine mercy”). 31

Summers’ careful comparison of the “sounds” of Eve’s speech with the Son’s “loving offer” to redeem Man (III.236–41) leads him to conclude that Eve is seen here to “mirror the redemptive actions of the Son” (178–9). Following this lead, Lim has remarked how “Her importance here in Book X is underscored by her constant use of the sacrificial ploce ‘mee’ which the reader recalls is the language of the Son’s prerogative in the heavenly council” (124), as he selflessly offers his life for mankind, “mee for him, life for life / I offer” (III.236–7). As Danielson has pointed out, the echo is particularly ironic “because it comes from Eve and not from Adam, the one who, as Samuel and others have pointed out, had the opportunity to offer himself for fallen Eve, the just for the unjust” (1989, 123).


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Something of the significance of such an underlying pattern here has long been acknowledged: Marjorie Hope Nicolson has contrasted the way in which Adam spends the time before their reconciliation in “intellectualizing the ways of God to men,” “Eve in feeling more and more poignantly her own sin” (304).32 Again, Lawrence Hyman has remarked that Adam is rescued from an apparent impasse, “not by logic but by an appeal to his emotion,” and he has observed how this forms a profoundly significant part of Milton’s complex design since, “the emotional attachment to Eve which brought about his falling away from God, is now the direct cause of Adam’s return” (72). Indeed, we have already been prepared for the positive influence that may be exerted by Eve upon Adam (VIII.474–5), but the numinous power of her feminine softness is most significantly measured by its impact on Satan himself. In terms that are especially significant here, since the collocation of “obdurate” (from obdurare, to be hard, hardened) with “relent” reinforces the fundamental opposition between “soft” and “hard,” Raphael had doubted whether anything could “move the obdurate” fallen angels “to relent” since the “signs” and “wonders” that marked Messiah’s approach had left them fixed in their resolve (VI.790–791). It might well have come as a surprise to the archangel to learn that Eve’s “Heav’nly forme / Angelic, but more soft and Feminine” (IX.457–8, emphasis added),33 at least temporarily “bereav’d” even the obdurate Satan of “His fierceness” and “the fierce intent it brought” (IX.461–2). In the light of such an affective power it is scarcely surprising that Eve’s softness soothes Adam’s “fierce passion” (X.865) altogether. Thus “softened,” Adam no longer despairs, but trusts that when approached with prayers and tears, God will likewise extend his forgiveness and “relent and turn / From his displeasure” (X.1093–4). As in the Metamorphoses the pattern thus repeats itself, and, as the vantage point now moves upward to the heavenly perspective, we see “The stonie” has been removed from the hearts (XI.3–4) of the penitent couple. When the Father beholds them “soften’d and with tears” repenting their sin (XI.110–111), he relents in turn. Appearing to Adam’s inward, spiritual vision, “placable and mild, / Bending his eare” (XI.151–2), he ensures that their sentence is not too “rigorously urg’d” (XI.109, emphasis added).34 However, the 32 Werman’s more recent work, “Repentance in Paradise Lost,” gives a persuasive account of how their repentance is “mutually engendered,” see especially 133–4. 33 Fowler notes how, “Bentley sneered at soft, on the ground that if Eve’s form were softer than angelic, she would be altogether fluid and no ‘fit Mate for her Husband’ .” Although Fowler effectively answers Bentley’s literal-minded complaint with a timely reminder that “soft” need not always mean “physically yielding and flexible,” but may equally suggest “gentle, free from severity or rigour (OED II 8),” Bentley’s objection nevertheless draws attention to the poetic emphasis accorded Eve’s softness by Milton at this point. 34 “Rigorous ... I.1 characterised by rigour, rigidly severe or unbending; austere, harsh, stern; extremely strict” (OED). Coincidentally, the OED also supplies the following example of “rigor” taken from Dryden’s translation of the miraculous softening of stones from the first book of the Metamorphoses: “The Stones ... Did first the r. of their kind expel, And suppled into softness as they fell.”

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sequence outlined above is a slight, though significant, over-simplification of the chain of events that unfolds in Heaven: before mankind finds forgiveness, the Son must intercede with the Father on their behalf and urge Him likewise to soften and bend: “Now therefore bend thine eare / To supplication,” he urges (XI.30–31). The hard-soft dichotomy is not therefore merely a physical and psychological duality in human beings; it also determines the relationship of the Father and the Son. VI Many readers have shared Nicolson’s view that: “One aspect of Milton’s Godhead is an Old Testament God of Justice, and sometimes of Wrath; the other is a New Testament God of Mercy and Love” (230). While recent criticism has endeavoured to prove that such a perspective is a distortion of the text – which clearly includes justice and mercy, wrath and love as aspects of both the Father and the Son35 – nevertheless, in the actual dramatization of the scenes in heaven, righteous indignation36 and the inflexible demands of justice are voiced almost exclusively by the Father, while the softer attributes of mildness and compassion seem invariably reserved for the Son. In his speeches in Book III, the Father’s concern for the claims of retributive justice and the harsh means to discipline mankind, once fallen, seem more in evidence than his love and mercy, while the Son’s successive pleas for leniency on Man’s behalf “serve only,” as John Evans has shrewdly pointed out, “to emphasize the Father’s unyielding severity” (231). The Father’s speech (III.168–216) does finally move “beyond the exactions of law” to create “a world in which charity becomes an imaginative fact as well as a theological principle” as Balachandra Rajan’s fine analysis has shown (1966, 56–60). Yet the severity obdurately remains in the relentlessness of “He with his whole posteritie must dye” (III.209), the punitive inflexibility of “Dye hee or Justice must” (III.210) and the unmitigated starkness of “The rigid satisfaction, death for death” (III.212), where, as Patrick Hume first observed in his note on the verse, “The word Rigid seems to imply a stiffness, an unrelenting satisfaction to be made to the Almighty Justice ... Rigidus Lat. hard, stiff.”37 35 Shullenberger, for example, insists that “To understand the Son ... is to understand something of the Father’s deepest nature, in particular, the qualities of ‘Divine compassion’, ‘Love without end, and without measure Grace’ ” (1986, 73). 36 In De Doctrina Christiana Milton reflected upon the way God accommodates himself to the human mind; he concluded that we should imagine God anthropomorphically because Deus humana membra et speciem passim sibi tribuit (“God habitually assigns to himself human limbs and form”; I.2; Col. 14.34) Extending this point, he notes the way human emotions such as anger and regret are likewise ascribed to the deity: Si pœnituit Iehovam quod hominem fecisset Gen. vi.6 ... pœnituisse credamus; “If ‘Jehovah repented that he had created man,’ Gen. vi. 6 ... let us believe that he did repent” (I.2; Col. 14.32). 37 “The line of criticism of Milton’s God as stuffy and cruel Godfather runs,” as Shullenberger has noted, “from Dr. Johnson through C. S. Lewis and William Empson to feminist critics” (1986, 72).


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In his provocative discussion, Alan Sinfield claims that the stern authoritarian deity of Reformation theology exercised a powerful, formative influence on Milton’s conception of the Father whom, he argues, even bears a disconcerting resemblance to Satan in his rigid fixity: The reader who admires Milton’s intellect and verbal gift will be on the lookout for hints of a softening of the implications of the tyrannical deity. The notion that Milton’s sympathies are with Satan is no help, for Satan is entirely like God. They both conceive an implacable enmity towards those who infringe what they take to be their rights; they both make proud, rigorous, legalistic and equivocal speeches of self-justification. The difference is that God is right and Satan is wrong; or in Hobbesian terms, God is more powerful. Milton may empathize with Satan, but it does not help him to see beyond a punitive ethic. (148)

If we cannot expect even such an independent and original thinker as Milton to transcend his historical context entirely, no more do we expect him to be a passive reflector of his times. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Father is somehow silently reproached by the poet in the Son’s generous offer to sacrifice himself for mankind, in the same way as Adam is put to shame by Eve’s impulsive determination to give her life for him and take all the punishment upon herself. 38 It has been claimed that in Milton’s patriarchal universe, the feminine principle is first found in hell, then on earth but never in heaven.39 Yet the “soft,” even “feminine”40 qualities of the Son are placed in dramatic contrast to the “hard” or masculine attributes of the Father, and the two aspects of the Godhead only attain their highest perfection together as a transcendent union of contraries. This suggests that neither term of the equation, soft or hard, is sufficient in itself. If this reciprocal duality is found even in God as Father and Son, then the principle of dynamic, informing difference is not a mere physiological necessity for Adam and Eve: it is the nature of things. The relationship of the sexes thus reflects this primary relationship between the Father and the Son:41 the Father completes himself in the Son42 just as Adam is incomplete without Eve, “In unitie defective” (VIII.425). As the Son is to the Father, so to an extent is Eve to Adam, and this correlation in turn prepares us for the bold poetic equation of their redemptive agency. Indeed, there

38

Danielson’s article (1989) is particularly instructive here. Landy (10); and see too Gilbert (1978, 373). 40 Webber has claimed that the Son embodies “the more ‘feminine’ qualities of love and mercy” (3), rejecting “all the so-called masculine virtues” (20). 41 “In effect, the cooperative androgyne of the Father and Son is paradigmatic of Adam and Eve’s relation” (Swiss, 2002, 268). 42 See III.383–9; the Father’s claims to be “alone / From all Eternitie, for none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (VIII.405–7) seem hardly consistent with the hymn to his “Divine Similitude” (III.384) nor with His address at III.168–70. 39

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are no precedents, scriptural, poetic43 or otherwise, for the decisive role Eve plays in the regenerative process envisaged here by Milton.44 At the same time, Satan, whose “obdured brest” (II.568) could be said to be struck by the “Mace petrific” (X.294) and “Gorgonian rigor” (X.297) of spiritual death, entirely lacks this countervailing softening influence – except significantly, in his encounters with Eve45 – and so it is in Satan that the process of spiritual petrification is most fully realized. As Mary Hoffman has observed: “As much as is Satan’s mind ‘fixt’ and unregenerate, just as much is his hell a hell of process, of endlessly recapitulating the fall and hardening one’s heart against the possibilities of redemption” (14).46 Satan’s hardening of his heart, closing himself off from the possibility of change, is enacted most clearly in the soliloquy which opens Book IV (lines 32–113), and forms the grounds for John Marchant’s rejection of Newton’s attempt to emend “relent” to “repent” in line 79 of this passage. In his note to this verse Marchant argues: I cannot be of Dr Newton’s opinion that repent here is a better word than relent. Satan is all along remarkable for his obdurate Hatred and unrelenting malice to the Almighty ... for never since he rebell’d, did he once give Satan Liberty to reflect on the horrid Nature of his Offence; but now the glorious Objects that are in his View, which bring fresh into his memory the happy and exalted Station from which he fell; the Reflection on his own monstrous Ingratitude, which stings him to the Heart; and the sense of his present condition, which was unspeakably miserable, all together soften him into a wish that he had never offended in the manner he had done; that his Heart relents, which is the first step towards Repentance.

However, “When remorse led not to repentance but to hardened persistence,” earlier readers would have recognized, as Alastair Fowler explains in his note to 43 Sylvester’s Du Bartas omits any representation of the steps leading to the reconciliation of Adam and Eve in his account of the Fall and its aftermath. 44 Miltonists remain divided over the significance to be attributed to Eve’s actions here. While much recent criticism has followed Summers’ lead in emphasizing the pivotal role played by Eve in initiating the process of reconciliation and regeneration (Harris, 38; Radzinowicz, especially 171; and Lim 127), scholars like McColley (1983) and Lewalski (2000, 486) have stopped short of ascribing to Eve a redemptive role. Christopher explains her reservations about the typological reading of Eve’s role, insisting that the latter’s lack of faith at this point seriously compromises her redemptive agency (74–5). Fresch acknowledges the cogency of Christopher’s claim, but sensibly cautions: “between types and antitypes there must be difference as well as similarity. Type and antitype would collapse toward identity, and historical fulfilment toward cyclical repetition without the element of difference” (265–6). Significant contributions to the debate, which argue for Eve’s alignment with the Son as a human agent of salvation, include: Swan (63–4); Shullenberger (1986, 79); Danielson (1989, 122–3); Doerksen (126). 45 The only other occasion Satan feels himself “melt” (IV.389) is when he momentarily responds to the graceful forms of both Adam and Eve (IV.364–5). 46 See too, Swiss (1994, 56–61).


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the passage, “that a new phase in damnation had been reached.” Satan hardens his resolve like the “obdurat King” (XII.205), who “Humbles his stubborn heart,” only to be “as Ice / More hard’nd after thaw” (XII.193–4).47 Of course, the heart like “marble ice / Both cold and hard” (Schola Cordis, Epigram 16.1–2) was a familiar motif that featured in the work of those emblematists, like Christopher Harvey, concerned with translating the life of the spirit into easily apprehensible physical terms. While this similarity has led Hoffman to conclude that Milton’s treatment of Satan’s hard-heartedness is “very suggestive of Henry Vaughan’s emblem to Silex Scintillans (1650)” (13–14), she sensibly cautions against the assumption of any specific indebtedness on Milton’s part, attributing the resemblance to a shared currency of ideas. As Peter Daly has similarly concluded in his study of Literature in the Light of the Emblem, “The emblematic way of thinking and the emblematic method of composition are undoubtedly more important and more pervasive than the instances of exact parallels with emblem-books” (186). The use of such emblematic imagery need not seem surprising since, as Rosemary Freeman’s survey revealed, though “the conventions on which they were based ... were obviously more suited for the expression of Catholic than of Protestant religious ideas,” in English emblem books the actual “treatment of the themes, however they may be represented in the engravings, remains essentially Protestant” (139). Barbara Lewalski too has pointed out that the “School of the Heart” tradition of emblem making was used by Protestants and Catholics alike.48 Harvey’s Schola Cordis or the heart of it Selfe, gone away from God, brought back againe to him, and instructed by him is, as its subtitle makes clear, a series of spiritual emblems detailing stages in the spiritual life of the Christian soul that have been, as Michael Bath maintains, purposefully adapted to the needs of Protestant readers, “by grounding their doctrinal authority more directly on the responses of the soul to the voice of holy scripture itself” (185). Indeed, the image of the hardened heart, “Embleme 8,” cordis durities (the hardness of the heart, 32), derives ultimately from a text that was of crucial importance to Reformation theology, and which has an important bearing on the discussion here. The lines describing the process of spiritual petrification in Book XII (193–4, quoted above) plainly allude to the sequence in Exodus (IX–XIV) where it is repeatedly stated that it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites. This had been interpreted by St Paul to mean that God “hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Rom. IX.18). Both passages, which leave everything to the will of God and nothing to choice, are at 47

Shullenberger concludes, “In the self-closure and petrification of his identity, Satan becomes the antitype of all those who withhold themselves from the possibility of grace” (1993, 42). 48 An abstract of this paper, “Emblems and Religious Lyric, George Herbert and Protestant Emblematics,” delivered at the 1976 MLA convention in New York, is published in MQ 11 (1977), 27.


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the very heart of orthodox Protestant teachings on salvation. In De Servo Arbitrio (1525), Luther put great emphasis on the bondage of the will after the Fall, while Calvin argued that it seemed to afford incontrovertible evidence that salvation and damnation were wholly in God’s hands (III.xxii.11). In Paradise Lost, however, Milton is at pains to emphasize the inclusiveness of God’s offer to “soft’n stonie hearts” (III.189). He extends grace to all mankind, excluding from mercy only those who “neglect and scorn” His “day of grace”; it is thus only those who are obdurately “hard” that will be “hard’nd ... more” (III.198– 202).49 Nevertheless, the Father firmly insists that He alone is responsible for the salvation of those who are saved: “Man shall not quite be lost, but saved who will, / Yet not of will in him, but grace in me” (III.173–4); that fallen man is unable to turn back to God by his own unaided efforts is made unambiguously clear by the Father’s further pronouncement that man owes: “All his deliverance” “to me ... and to none but me” (III.181–2). This is also clearly in keeping with orthodox Protestantism which stressed, by contrast with the Catholic view, fallen man’s inability to initiate or in any way contribute to the process of his own salvation. As Golda Werman points out, “even the faith by which man accepts God’s grace” was thought to be “a divine gift” (123). Accordingly, in the opening lines of Book XI we see how “Prevenient Grace” has “remov’d / The stonie from thir hearts,” alluding to the softening process described in Ezekiel: “And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh” (XI.19). Milton thus draws upon these resonant scriptural echoes to provide a biblical framework for his own symbolic structure. However, the actual dramatization of man’s repentance and reconciliation to God does not evolve with quite the same emphasis on the passivity of man’s role in his spiritual regeneration. Just as in the Metamorphoses, where it is the actions of Deucalion and Pyrrha that secure the future of the human race, the separation of the action into two planes, the human and divine, in Paradise Lost makes the scene of mankind’s reconciliation to God the natural pendent to the earlier scene of reconciliation between Eve and Adam. Given the evident parallelism between the two movements, it is hard to dismiss the significance of this connection, especially since the reconciliation of Eve and Adam, like the subsequent reconciliation of man and God, is without scriptural precedent. Adam’s forgiveness of Eve is arguably the pivotal moment in mankind’s regeneration, but it is Eve’s initiative in approaching Adam submissively, with soft words and tears, which has secured

49

This is in keeping with Arminian doctrine, which holds that man is free to accept or reject God’s universal offer of grace to mankind. For a helpful discussion of “Milton’s Arminianism and Paradise Lost,” see Danielson (1978, 58–91). On “softness of heart” as a prerequisite for salvation, see Calvin (II.v.72–3), and compare, De Doctrina Christiana I.8 (Col. 15.70ff).


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his softened response and has enabled him to understand how God may likewise soften when humbly approached with prayers and repentance:50 What better can we do, then to the place Repairing where he judg’d us, prostrate fall Before him reverent, and there confess Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears Watering the ground, and with our sighs the Air Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek. Undoubtedly he will relent and turn From his displeasure. (X.1086–94)

In the opening lines of Book XI the reader is reminded that their repentance has only been made possible by the softening action of “Prevenient Grace” which has “remov’d / The stonie from thir hearts, & made new flesh / Regenerate grow instead” (3–5), but this explanation is only offered after we have witnessed Adam and Eve acting together to soften the stony and turn aside the anger of heavenly powers with their prayers and tears. Through the mediation of Ovidian myth, “softness” is no longer a designation of gender weakness:51 it has assumed a transcendent value ensuring Eve’s reconciliation to Adam, man’s reconciliation to God and mankind’s spiritual regeneration. VII The first stage of the Father’s promise to regenerate mankind is fulfilled in the inward change that takes place in Adam and Eve and which is symbolized, with characteristic subtlety and indirection on Milton’s part, in the re-creation of the human race by Deucalion and Pyrrha through the miraculous softening of stones. Indeed, Ovid’s fable had long been invested with such Christian significance and allegorized as a symbol of conversion.52 So Sandys’ commentary on the passage describing the regeneration of the human race from stones notes that God is said in the Gospell to be able of stones to raise up children unto Abraham: the sence not unlike, though diviner: meaning the ingrafting of the Gentiles into his faith, hardned in sinne through ignorance and custome. So the giving us hearts of flesh insteed of those of stone, is meant by our conversion. (70)

50

Eve’s supplicatory gesture, as she beseeches Adam’s forgiveness in “lowlie plight” (X.937), provides the model for their joint prayer for forgiveness as they stand before God, “in lowliest plight” (XI.1). 51 As we have seen, even before the Fall, Eve’s comparative weakness is seen entirely in negative terms in Sylvester’s Du Bartas (II.i.2.281–3). 52 See Fowler’s note to XI.10–14.

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Moreover, the context in which Milton openly refers us to Ovid’s myth points decisively towards such an interpretation. In the preceding lines, Milton makes explicit what is implicit here, preparing us for the transformation of a pagan image into the pre-figuration of Christian truth. In his gloss on lines 3–5, Patrick Hume describes how prevenient grace, “made a relenting Tenderness, like the Flesh of a newborn Babe grow in their Harts, in stead of their stubborn Hardness,” and goes on to interpret this change specifically in terms of Christian regeneration:53 The Conversion of a Sinner, is in Scripture-Phrase styled, Regeneration, a Newbirth; Regeneratio, Lat. Our Saviour discoursed with Nicodemus, John 3.3 Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of god.

With our thoughts thus directed to the inward change experienced by Adam and Eve as a type of Christian rebirth in which “homo interior vetere abolito ... veluti creatura nova ex deo regeneratur” (“the old man being destroyed, the inward man is regenerated by god ... insomuch that he becomes as it were a new creature”) (DDC I.18; Col. 15.366), it is hard to miss the symbolic significance encountered here in the re-creation of mankind by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Spiritual regeneration, though ultimately the responsibility of God alone, works through the efforts of Adam and Eve, who are seen in some measure to contribute to their own salvation, just as Deucalion and Pyrrha are the necessary instruments of the regenerative process in the Metamorphoses. Milton’s use of typological patterning allows him to suggest what he does not in fact say, that Deucalion and Pyrrha’s renewal of the human race through the miraculous softening of stones is a valid pagan analogue for the process of inward Christian regeneration.54 The representation of Adam and Eve as Deucalion and Pyrrha establishes our conviction in the spiritual potentiality of ordinary humanity. God works: ... by small Accomplishing great things, by things deemd weak Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise By simply meek. (XII.566–9)

VIII It is generally recognized that Milton exploits the rhetorical possibilities of typological patterning to organize his survey of human history and propel his 53 In the terms set forth by Milton in De Doctrina Christiana, Adam and Eve are thus released from the second degree of death, Mors Spiritualis, and may be said, “regenerari ... et renasci et denuo creari” (“ to be ‘ regenerated,’ to be ‘born again,’ and to be ‘created afresh’ ,” I.12; Col. 15.204). 54 Indeed, it is perhaps not too fanciful to regard Adam and Eve as the first Christians, for by the end of the epic they are saved by their faith in Christ as their redeemer; as Fowler concludes, “Faith is the theme of Bk xi, as repentance was the theme of Bk x” (note to XI.355).


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narrative forward through time to eternity.55 However, the basic progression “From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit” (XII.303), from Old Testament figures to New Testament fulfilment, can be found to extend further still, once the pre-figurative value attached by Milton to Deucalion and Pyrrha is also fully recognized. Through his controlled and imaginative use of typological patterning, Milton’s alignment of Adam and Eve with Deucalion and Pyrrha plays a vital role in the progressive definition of salvation that emerges in the final books of the epic as the reader ascends “by types / And shadows” (XII.232–3) in three steps: from the first judgement and regeneration of mankind to the second judgement and renewal of the human race through Noah and his family, through to the Last Judgement and the resurrection to eternal life. Ovid’s myth is arguably the hinge upon which this typological structure turns. Deucalion and Pyrrha, “saved for their vertue ... while the vitious are swallowed by their owne impieties” (Sandys, 69), look forward to the general “Deluge” (XI. 843) in which “one whole World / Of wicked Sons destroyd” (XI. 874–5) and its survivors, Noah and his family, for whom God “relents, not to blot out mankind” (XI. 891) and decides to “raise another World” (XI.877). The story of Noah in turn looks directly toward the Last Judgement when fire rather than water will “purge all things new” (XI.900) and “dissolve / Satan with his perverted World” before “New Heav’ns, new Earth, Ages of endless date” are raised “From the conflagrant mass, purg’d and refin’d” (XII.546–9).56 Indeed, Milton extends the pivotal function of the myth still further: it turns backwards as well as forwards, gathering Adam and Eve into the same pattern of typological fulfilment, moving from death to new life, from destruction to re-creation. This pattern in which the “faithless herd” is set against the “faithful few” appears in its most condensed form at this point in the narrative. Since Adam and Eve are the only extant examples of mankind, they represent both corrupt humanity in their Fall, and, as their offensiveness to God is washed away in a flood of tears, the faithful in their regeneration. That Milton intended the two re-creations to be considered together is suggested by the way in which one forms the natural pendant to the other, forming an enclosing frame to the eleventh book. Between the final lines of Book X and the opening lines of Book XI the narrative stands poised between the destructive effects of the Fall and the restorative effects of regeneration until the allusion to Ovid’s myth tips the balance and confirms Adam and Eve’s second chance of life. Turning to the close of Book XI and the beginning of Book XII, the Archangel likewise pauses “Betwixt the world destroy’d and

55

See, for instance, Green (2007), and also Schwartz, who offers a different view of the effects of typological patterning here. 56 The two judgements and accompanying cataclysms, which would purge the world by flood and fire respectively, were linked in Scripture: Luke XVII.26–30. Milton expressly associates the two (XI.892–901), as does Ovid (Met. I.256–8), where Jupiter reflects upon the general conflagration that is to end the world.


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the world restor’d” (XII.3), and the same structural pattern is repeated.57 The narrator’s comment – though physically located in Book XII (lines 1–5) – stands as a self-contained paragraph, interposed between the two visions of destruction and re-creation, and forms one of the more important additions to the original text that Milton made when he recast the tenth and final book of the first edition into Books XI and XII of the second. Since one of the most obvious effects of this new arrangement was to thrust the story of Noah into greater prominence and thereby tighten the structural parallelism between the first and second judgements of mankind, it provides evidence of an unusual kind of Milton’s concern to deepen the correspondence between the two, evidence that cannot be lightly dismissed. Again, the Flood’s purging of the world’s corruption as a necessary preliminary to a new creation58 casts a retrospective light on Adam and Eve’s flood of tears. Adam and Eve, like Noah and his family, are “saved by water.”59 Their tears become a “signe / Of washing them from guilt of sin to Life / Pure” (XII.442–4), as they are thus symbolically baptized “with water unto repentance.”60 Again, Michael’s revelation: “Such grace shall one just Man find in his sight, / That [God] relents, not to blot out mankind” (XI.890–891) looks back to where the Father, accepting Adam and Eve’s prayers, had similarly relented and turned from his displeasure, via Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses of how: Iuppiter ut liquidis stagnare paludibus orbem et superesse virum de tot modo milibus unum et superesse videt de tot modo milibus unam, innocuos ambo, cultores numinis ambo, nubila disiecit nimbisque aquilone remotis et caelo terras ostendit et aethera terris. (Met. I.324–9) When Jupiter saw that the world was covered in a pool of stagnant waters, and that only one man was left from so many thousands, and that only one woman too was left from so many thousands, both innocent and both worshippers of God, he scattered the clouds, and when the rain-storms had been swept away by the north wind, he showed the land once more to the sky, and the heavens to the land.

57

The archangel pauses once more, of course, when the pattern reaches its final completion: “at the Worlds great period” (XII.467). 58 Fowler discovers in XI.852–4 echoes of VII.285 ff, describing “the receding waters at the Creation,” and finds the underlying connection to imply: “ ‘one whole world’ (I.874) has been destroyed, and that God is creating afresh a New Creation based on the Covenant.” 59 Compare 1 Pet. III.20–21: “in the days of Noah ... few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us.” 60 John the Baptist declares here that the baptism he performs with water is a sign of the baptism “with the Holy Ghost, and with fire” that Christ will administer which in turn looks towards the Last Judgement and the final purgation by fire (Matt. III.11–12).


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So too, since the appearance of the rainbow betokens “peace from God, and Cov’nant new” (XI.867), the descent of God’s messenger Michael in raiment “dipt” by “Iris” (XI.244) also acquires a special significance in retrospect as a “pacific signe” (XI.860) and token of God’s “Cov’nant in the womans seed renewd” (XI.116).61 As a result of the attractive power of such associative links, the forward movement of the narrative is counter-sprung by references backward to other new beginnings, milestones on the journey to mankind’s resurrection and the final regeneration to “new life” (III.294). While Adam and Eve’s regeneration may only be “a miniature microcosmic anticipation of what the human race will experience through the Son’s future incarnation” (Blamires, 271), it is, nonetheless, instrumental in furthering the spiritual redemption of mankind.62 Although critics have recognized the typological function of the story of Noah, they have tended to underestimate the way in which Adam and Eve have become part of this ascending sequence, completed and fulfilled in Christ as mankind’s “second root” (III.288). Cherrell Guilfoyle, for example, notes that “in the opening lines of Book XII Michael tells Adam of the ‘second stock’ (7), ‘This second sours of Men’ (13) which will rise from the eight survivors on the ark, led and redeemed by Christ, the greater Noah” (48). Fowler too comments on the significance of “stock” in his note to line 7 of Book XII, regarding it as: An ambiguity, referring not only to the literal replacement of one source of the human line of descent (Adam) by another (Noah), but also to the grafting of mankind onto the stem of Christ according to the Pauline allegory of regeneration (Rom.xi).

However, it is important to remember that the regeneration of Adam and Eve had already been included in this “gardening metaphor,” of incorporation in Christ as an engrafting, “used by St. Paul often, Rom.XI.v.17, 19, 23 etc.,” as Patrick Hume in his note to line 35 of Book XI had made clear.63 Consequently, both the renewed covenant with Adam and Eve, and the Covenant with Noah, become types of the New Covenant and, as such, not only prefigure, but in some way further mankind’s salvation. The effect is cumulative, progressing from type to truth in a powerful crescendo movement. But as we move in ascending order from the Old Adam to the New, the fullest structural and poetic emphasis naturally comes to centre, not

61 This descriptive detail acquires considerable weight when we remember that in Book V we are simply told that Raphael appears in “colours” that were “dipt in Heav’n” (283). This answers Bush’s complaint that “the reference attracts attention to itself as a small but superfluous patch” (1932, 285). 62 Sadler has perceptively commented on Milton’s dynamic view of history “in which each dispensation progressively unfolds God’s Providence and the way by which each man may be regenerate in his own day” (144). 63 See too, De Doctrina Christiana I.18 and I.21 (Col. 15.366 and 16.2–4).

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upon pious couples, but types of the “one just Man” (XI.818) found “so perfet and so just” (XI.876) for whose sake “man shall find grace” (III.227).64 Nevertheless, in these final books Eve, as well as being the immediate instrument of grace in man’s redemption, assumes a prominent typological role in her own right through Milton’s identification of Mary as the “second Eve” (V.387; X.183). While patristic writings chiefly defined Mary’s figurative relation to Eve through contrast, elaborating the ways her obedience reversed the damage done by her predecessor’s disobedience, Milton deepens and extends the pre-figurative significance of Eve’s role to the point where she virtually subsumes Mary’s part as the woman through whom true life is to come: indeed, Eve is hailed one final time, not simply as “Mother of all Mankind,” but, as Adam goes on to correct himself, the “Mother of all things living, since,” he explains, “by thee / Man is to live, and all things live for Man” (XI.159–61). “Even in the last books,” Pecheux has astutely noted, “it is less perhaps that Eve is absorbed in Mary than that Mary is absorbed in Eve” (366). This movement is encapsulated in Eve’s expression of her conviction that: “though all by mee is lost, [...] By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore” (XII.621, 623); where the taut Ovidian chiasmus underscores her twofold agency in the loss and regaining of Paradise, and the line-break marks the pivotal turn from loss to restoration. These two lines are especially significant given the potency of the final word “restore.” Once again Eve is seen to be associated with the Son’s redemptive agency: in Book III the Father had pronounced that in his Son “As from a second root shall be restor’d, / As many as are restor’d” (288–9). By giving Eve the last word, Milton effectively destabilizes for one last time the traditional gender hierarchy of epic. IX In this final mythological simile, Milton uses Ovidian myth not to contrast with Christian truth but to deepen our understanding of Christian salvation and the regenerative and degenerative processes at work in human history. Most obviously, Deucalion and Pyrrha’s regeneration of mankind from hard stone to soft flesh proves a synthesizing and organizing image fundamental to our understanding of the processes of damnation and spiritual renewal. However, tracing the more complex and extended interplay between “soft” and “hard” in Paradise Lost yields significant insights into gender construction; the dynamic interaction between the sexes, Satan and Eve, the Father and Son, and the earthly and heavenly scenes of reconciliation, as well as into the opposing processes of spiritual petrification and regeneration. Not only does Eve’s meekness and patience become the pattern of

64 Sharrock has commented on a similar gradual elision of female presence in the final stages of Ovid’s poem: “which culminates in the grand finale of the deification of Caesar and the projected deification of Augustus” (2002, 105).


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Christian heroism65 fulfilled by Christ and his Virgin Mother Mary, but also Eve’s initiative in assuming a self-humbling, Christ-like role aligns her with the Son and finally distances her from the self-love of Satan who proves to more nearly resemble Narcissus, fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma (“in whose soft shape there was a pride so hard,” Met. III.354).

65

Schoenfeldt’s conclusions are pertinent here: “Working within a Christian system designed to repudiate the primogeniture of worldly hierarchies in its declaration that the last shall be first, Milton appropriately appealed to the secondary figure his culture termed a ‘weaker vessel’ to accomplish great things” (336).


Afterword

Poetic Afterlives: Ovid and Milton nunc precor ut vivant et non ignava legentem otia delectent admoneantque mei. (Tristia I.vii.25–26) Now I pray that they [the Metamorphoses] may live and that my leisure, not unproductive, may delight the reader and remind him of me.

The final word of the Metamorphoses is a defiant shout, vivam (“I shall live,” Met. XV.879). At the close of the poem, when Ovid contemplates his continued existence down through the ages (per ... omnia saecula, Met. XV.878), he is not merely imagining the survival of his literary corpus, but his own afterlife. Indeed, in years to come Ovid expressed a conviction that the Metamophoses would preserve a maior imago (“better likeness,” Tristia I.vii.11) of himself than any portrait would do. But when in the final lines of his masterpiece, Ovid had predicted a future in which ore legar populi (“I shall be read aloud on the lips of the people,” Met. XV.878), he was looking forward to a form of personal survival beyond the life of the body, one in which the act of reading would enable a kind of Pythagorean metempsychosis whereby the dead poet was reanimated in his readers and his creation would have a life of its own after the death of its author. The close association of vivam with ore legar populi blurs the boundaries between poet, creation and reader so that in some profound sense Ovid recognized that the life of his work, as well as his own continuation, depended on the participation of his readers. To read a text is to breathe life into that text. Milton too recognized that the author’s brain-child, whilst enjoying an independent life, embodied the vital spirit of its creator in its purest form so that the reader might still encounter the author as a living presence in his work: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. (Areopagitica, Col. 4.297–98)

Ovid confidently imagines his work reaching the whole nation, not just a select and cultivated few. Even after the sentence of exile had been passed upon him, Ovid’s “Books were neither banisht nor call’d in,” but remained readily available, as Milton himself observed in Areopagitica (Col. 4.301).


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In the final lines of the fourth book of the Tristia, Ovid directly addressed his ideal reader, candide lector, offering thanks for his own continuing existence: si quid habent igitur vatum praesagia veri, protinus ut moriar, non ero, terra, tuus. sive favore tuli, sive hanc ego carmine famam, iure tibi grates, candide lector, ago. (Tristia IV.x.129–32) If the prophecies of poets have any truth to them, then, as soon as ever I die, I shall not, Earth, be yours. Whether through your good-will or by my poetic power I have gained this fame, it is to you, open-minded reader, that I rightfully give thanks.

Milton was one such model reader who preserved Ovid as a vital living presence within the work that he trusted would likewise be, “so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die” (Church-Government, Col. 3.i.237). By choosing to follow the example of those who had laboured to raise the vernacular to the level and dignity of achievement reached by the writers of classical epic, Milton had contented himself with confining his reputation to his native land, “not caring,” as he put it, “to be once nam’d abroad” (Col. 3.i.236) so long as he could reach the whole nation: mi satis ampla Merces, & mihi grande decus (sim ignotus in ævum Tum licet, externo penitús inglorious orbi) Si me flava comas legat Usa, & potor Alauni, Vorticibúsque frequens Abra, & nemus omne Treantæ, Et Thamesis meus ante omnes, & fusca metallis Tamara, & extremis me discant Orcades undis. (Epitaphium Damonis 172–78) I shall have more than enough of a reward, and great glory (although I be forever unknown and utterly without fame to the outside world), if yellow-haired Ouse reads my poetry, and he who drinks from the Alan, and the Humber, full of whirlpools, and every grove of Trent, and above all my Thames and the Tamar, blackened with metals, and if the Orkneys among their distant waves will learn my song.

The interpretative choices Milton made when reading Ovid affected his own incarnation of the Metamorphoses in Paradise Lost, and this in turn has consequences when Milton’s reader re-visits Ovid. To take an obvious example, the textual fact that unlike Daphne or Chloris, Pomona does not fly from Vertumnus seems immeasurably more significant after reading Paradise Lost. Milton took what he needed from Ovid and, by some strange alchemy, left the original, as well as his own work, enriched by the theft. One reads Ovid differently after Milton. For further discussion of the evolution of Milton’s poetic enterprise, see Green (2006).

Afterword

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He was not, however, entirely proof to doubts and anxieties about the devaluation of poetry in a time of political crisis. In the Reason of Church-Government Milton had acknowledged that even if he had been at leisure to write his great work: “it were a folly to commit any thing elaborately compos’d to the carelesse and interrupted listening of these tumultuous times” (Col. 3.i.234). In the ode “To John Rouse, Librarian of Oxford University,” it is no longer just the time that is seen to be out of joint: Milton assures his book that the Bodleian library will provide it with a home, Quò neque lingua procax vulgi penetrabit, atque longè / Turba legentum prava facesset (“where the insolent clamouring of the rabble will never reach, away from the vulgar mob of readers,” 79–80). Milton seems here to have lost faith in finding a receptive readership in the present age: he clearly feared lest, even if he were free to devote himself to his great poetic enterprise, his “fit audience” might prove very “few” indeed (VII.31). After the Restoration the cross-comparison that the young Milton had elaborated in Elegia prima between his holiday “exile” in London, his native city and the cultural capital, and Ovid’s banishment from such an environment to a savage and alien land, was to develop a new twist as Milton found himself suffering such alienation within his own home town. His crisis of faith in his readership became ever more acute: it became a nightmare that plagued him. Milton turned to the fate of Orpheus to express the doubts that haunted him about reaching an appreciative audience and the feelings of isolation that now beset him within his native London, “fall’n on evil dayes, / On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues” (VII.25–6). How can the voice of the true poet be heard when even the divine power of Orpheus’s song had been overwhelmed by the “barbarous dissonance” and “savage clamor” (VII.33, 36) of a hostile and unheeding world? With the Restoration Milton had lost all hope of making of the present age, “a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies” (Areopagitica, Col. 4.341). Yet, Milton had rightly taken some consolation from the prospect that ... ultimi nepotes, Et cordatior ætas Judicia rebus æquiora forsitan Adhibebit integro sinu. Tum livore sepulto, Si quid meremur sana posteritas sciet. (Ad Joannem Roüsium 81–6)

In a short but suggestive article, Condee argued convincingly that such a crosscomparison operates as a fundamental structural device in the poem: the uncivilized place Ovid was banished to (Tomis) is as hostile to poetry and beauty as the place that Milton has been, at least temporarily, excluded from (Cambridge); while London, the scene of Milton’s “exile,” is like the cultured Rome that Ovid has had to leave, and supplies what Cambridge lacks– plays and pretty girls, together with the umbras molles (“soft shades,” 13) and otia grata (“delightful leisure,” 18) – so necessary for poetic composition.

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve The children of future generations, in some distant and wiser age will perhaps see things in a fairer light and with unprejudiced hearts. Then, when envy and malice are buried, posterity with its balanced judgement will know what, if anything, I deserve.

Milton’s faith in the resourcefulness and enduring power of the English language, too, would not be misplaced. Concern that his epic masterpiece should be preserved in a form that would reach an international audience was so great that Paradise Lost was translated into Latin by various different hands in the decade following its publication. Ironically, while the various versions of Paradisus Amissus are of interest nowadays merely as scholarly curiosities, Paradise Lost, has reached an audience across the world on a scale Milton himself could never have envisaged, having grimly reconciled himself to finding a “fit audience ... though few” (VII.31).

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Index Actaeon, 64 Adam, 11–12, 12n28, 13–21, 24–7, 27n9, 27n10, 28, 31, 33n18, 34n21, 35–6, 37n29, 38, 38n33, 40–41, 41n39, 42, 42n41, 42n43, 43, 43n44, 43n45, 44–5, 45n49, 45n50, 46, 48, 48n54, 50–51, 53, 53n3, 56–7, 57n11, 58–61, 59, 60, 61n14, 62–5, 63n15, 64, 66, 68–72, 75–6, 80–81, 82n11, 83n12, 85–6, 89–90, 90, 93n29, 95, 101, 101n5, 102n9, 102n10, 103, 103n12, 104, 106–107, 109–12, 112n31, 113–14, 113n33, 114n34, 115, 115n35, 116, 116n36, 116n37, 116n38, 118–21, 119n45, 123, 123n1, 123n2, 124–7, 127n10, 128–33, 133n26, 133n28, 134, 134n30, 135–9, 139n42, 140, 140n44, 141–2, 142n46, 143–4, 144n50, 145, 145n52, 146, 146n53, 147, 147n55, 148–50, 150n3, 151–2, 151n4, 152–8, 158n16, 159n17, 164, 164n32, 165–67, 167n41, 168, 168n43, 169, 170n45, 172, 175–6, 178–82, 182n2, 185–8, 188n14, 189, 189n17, 190–191, 190n19, 191, 191n21, 191n23, 193–4, 193n28, 193n29, 194–5, 197, 198n43, 198n45, 200–201, 201n50, 202–206, 202n53, 202n54, passim Adonis, 91, 93, 93n28 Adriana, 129 Aeneas, 11, 56n9 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 114n34 Ambrose, 94, 149n2 Anaxarete, 162n23, 189n16 Antaeus, 6n17 Antipholus of Syracuse, 129 Aphrodite, 109; see also Venus Apollo, 17–18, 37n28, 51, 53, 53n1, 53n3, 54, 54n4, 55, 55n8, 56–61, 61n14, 62, 64, 69–71, 73–4, 74n31, 75, 75n32, 77, 77n1, 78, 80, 132–4, 157, 166n36

Apollodorus, 182n3, 185n5 Apollonius, 56n9 Arethusa, 96 Ariosto, Ludovico, 100 Aristotle, 11 Athena, 93n26 Augustine, 8n22, 15n34, 93n29, 115–17, 152, 159n18, 170 Augustus, 10, 11, 54n5, 157, 183n4, 206n64 Bacon, Francis, 8n22 Bentley, Richard, 9, 85n16, 182, 196n33 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 80 Bible, x, 188n12 Botticelli, Sandro, 100, 103, 103n11, 108n23 Britomart, 72, 152n5 Bronte, Charlotte, 141n46 Cadmus, 167n40 Caesar, 206n64 Callisto, 157n15 Calvin, John, 15n34, 152, 200, 200n49 Camerarius, 167 Camilla, 155 Catullus, 128, 130, 131, 162n24 Cerberus, 92 Ceres, 83, 83n13, 84, 84n14, 85–9, 96, 100, 108, 154, 154n8, 177, 179–80, 180n62, 181, 192n27 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 150 Chloris, 17–8, 21n51, 77–9, 79n4, 80–83, 210n2 Christ, 6, 6n17, 7n21, 89, 93n28, 115, 122, 126, 131, 147, 148, 148n59, 148n61, 179n61, 180n62, 202n54, 204n60, 205, 207; see also Son (in Paradise Lost) Cicero, 84n14 Cinyras, 50 Circe, 21n50, 74, 92, 170–72, 172n47, 173–4, 174n50

230


Clement of Alexandria, 37n27, 167n41 Columbus, Christopher, 181 Comes, Natalis, 8n22, 172 Comus, 73–4, 165n34, 166n35 Corinthians, 103, 113, 126, 149, 149n1, 149n2 Cranach, Lucas, 100n3 Cupid, 54–6, 56n9, 69, 107n20, 174n51 Cyane, 175 Daphne, 17–18, 37n28, 51, 53, 53n1, 53n3, 54–5, 55n8, 56–60, 60n13, 61–74, 74n31, 75, 75n32, 76–7, 77n1, 78n2, 80, 94, 100, 149, 155, 157, 161, 166n36, 181, 210n2 de Medina, John Baptista, 103n13 Death (in Paradise Lost), 66–7, 88, 90, 90n18, 91, 91n21, 91n23, 93, 96–7, 171, 174n51 Delia, 154; see also Diana Delphic oracle, 47 Deucalion, 7n20, 7n21, 18, 182, 183–7, 183n4, 200–203, 206 Diana, 64, 75, 134n33, 143, 149, 154–5, 157n13, 157n15, 170, 174n51 Dido, 11, 56n9 Diodati, Charles, 108 Diodati, Giovanni, 36 Diodorus, 8n22 Diotima, 47m53 Dis, 175, 176n54 Donne, John, 45n50, 138, 140, 196n37 Dryden, John, 164n31, 189, 189n15, 195n34 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Sallust His Divine Weeks and Works (translation by Sylvester), 15, 17, 25, 27, 50, 57n11, 89, 91, 99, 115, 123, 123n1, 134n32, 150–51, 160n20, 164n29, 166n37, 198n43, 201n51 Echidna, 171 Echo, 29–31, 33n20, 40, 51, 66n23 Eden, Garden of, 7, 9, 77, 83–4, 86n17, 87–8, 94, 96, 98, 105, 111, 113, 116n38, 134n32, 137, 149, 158n16, 161n21, 162n26, 190; see also Paradise Eliot, T.S., 23 Enna, 84, 84n14, 176

Epistle of James, 93n27 Etherege, George, 69n29 Euripides, 2n9 Eurydice, 26n8, 174, 177, 179, 179b61, 181 Eve, 6n16, 7, 7n19, 9n25, 10–12, 12n27, 12n28, 15n35, 15n37, 15n38, 16, 16n40, 17–20, 20n47, 21, 21n49, 21n51, 22–3, 23n4, 24–5, 25n6, 26–7, 27n9, 27n10, 28, 28n11, 34n21, 35, 35n24, 36–7, 37n26, 37n29, 38, 38n30, 38n33, 39–41, 41n39, 42n41, 43, 43n45, 44–5, 45n50, 46–8, 48n54, 49–50, 50n57, 51–3, 53n3, 54–60, 60n13, 61, 63, 63n15, 64–79, 79n5, 80–81, 81n7, 81n8, 82, 82n11, 82n19, 83, 83n12, 84n14, 85, 85n15, 86–93, 93n28, 93n29, 94, 97n35, 98–100, 100n3, 101, 101n5, 102, 102n7, 102n8, 102n9, 102n10, 103, 103n11, 103n12, 104–105, 105n16, 106–107, 107n21, 107n22, 108–13, 113n33, 114, 114n34, 115, 115n35, 116, 116n36, 116n37, 116n38, 117n39, 117n41, 118–19, 119n44, 119n45, 120–22, 121n45, 123, 123n1, 123n2, 124–27, 124n5, 124n6, 125–7, 127n10, 128–33, 133n26, 133n27, 133n28, 134, 134n30, 135, 135n35, 135n36, 136–7, 137n39, 138–9, 139n42, 140, 140n44, 141–3, 143n48, 144, 144n50, 145, 145n52, 146, 146n53, 147–8, 148n61, 149–50, 150n3, 151, 151n4, 152–3, 153n7, 154–7, 157n13, 158, 158n16, 159–60, 160n19, 160n20, 161, 161n22, 162–4, 162n26, 164n29, 164n31, 165–6, 166n35, 166n37, 167, 167n39, 167n41, 168, 168n43, 169–70, 170n45, 172–3, 173n48, 174, 174n51, 175, 177, 179–80, 179n60, 180n62, 181–2, 182n2, 183–8, 188n11, 188n14, 189, 189n15, 189n17, 190, 190n20, 191, 191n21, 191n23, 193–4, 194n30, 195, 195n33, 196–8, 198n43, 198n44, 198n45, 200–201, 201n50, 201n51, 202, 202n53, 202n54, 203–208, passim

Index Evelyn, John, 124 Exodus 199 Ezekiel, 200

Hume, Patrick, 2n8, 28n11, 29, 65, 66, 196, 202 Hyginus, 8n22

Father (in Paradise Lost), 196, 197n42, 200, 201, 206; see God the Father Faunus, 161, 169 Ficino, Marsilio, 47n53, 108n24, 110 Flora, 17–18, 21n51, 77–9, 79n4, 79n5, 80–81, 81n7, 82–3, 94, 99, 99n1, 100, 169 Freud, Sigmund, 64, 168 Fulgentius, 8n22

Iphis, 162n23 Irenaeus, 7n19 Isaiah, 2

Genesis, 5, 17–18, 24, 26–7, 27n9, 36, 50–51, 58, 77, 83, 103, 113, 120, 123, 133n28, 150, 159, 167n41, 174 Glaucus, 92, 92n25 God the Father (in Paradise Lost), 35–6, 42–4, 46–9, 57, 60, 72, 82n11, 86, 86n17, 93, 97, 109–19, 123, 123n2, 125, 127, 131–2, 135–7, 140, 146–7, 170n45, 173, 178–80, 187–8, 193–205 Golding, Arthur, 5, 7, 33, 37, 39, 39n35, 47, 73, 92, 166, 174n50 Goodman, Godfrey, 5, 15n34, 89, 115, 126, 145n52 Gouge, William, 15n34, 194 Graces, the, 104–105, 106n19, 107n20, 108 Guild, William, 6 Hades, 176 Hamartia (daughter of Satan and Eve), 171 Harvey, Christopher, 147, 199 Hazlitt, William, 100, 107n22, 118n43 Hercules,, 6n17 Hermaphroditus, 192 Hermione, 167n40 Hesiod, 23, 182n3, 183n4 Holy Trinity, 93n28 Homer, 2, 2n7, 2n9, 9, 11, 56n9, 91n22, 91n23, 104n14, 172n47, 174, 174n50 Homeric Hymn to Deneter, 96n34, 174n51, 176 Homeric Hymn to (Delian) Apollo, 91n21 Horace, 128, 131 Hours, the, 105

231

Jason, 56n9 Jerome, 149n2 Job, 2, 188n12 John, 148 John the Baptist, 204n60 Johnson, Samuel, 2n9, 12, 197n37 “Joves Alcides”, 6n17 Junius, 140n44 Jupiter, 53n1, 75, 87, 157n15, 164, 167, 167n39, 177, 180, 182–3, 203 Keats, John, 3, 178n57 Lactantius, 7, 47n52 Lauder, William, 6 London, 90, 211n4 Lucretia, 161n22 Lucretius, 1n3, 105n17, 119, 188n12, 190n19 Luther, Martin, 200 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 9 Macrobius, 8n22 Margaret, Queen, 190 Marvell, Andrew, 41n40 Mary, 7n19, 97, 121, 121n45, 122, 206, 207 Mary Powell (wife of John Milton), 90, 177, 178 Matthew, 148n59, 204n60 Medea, 56n9 Medicis, 135n35 Medusa, 93, 93n26 Mercury, 53n1, 102 Michael, 83, 159, 191, 205 Micyllus, 8n22 Milton, Deborah (daughter of John Milton), 2 Milton, John, 1, 1n1, 1n2, 1n3, 2, 2n6, 2n9, 3–4, 4n12, 5n14, 6n16, 6n17, 7, 7n19, 7n20, 8, 8n23, 9–11,

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Milton’s Ovidian Eve 11n26, 12–15, 15n35, 15n37, 16, 16n39, 16n40, 17–21, 21n50, 21n51, 22–3, 23n1, 24, 26, 31–3, 33n18, 34n21, 37–8, 40, 40n38, 41–2, 41n40, 42n43, 45, 45n50, 46, 47m53, 48, 51, 53, 56–9, 61, 63, 63n16, 64–5, 66n22, 67n26, 74–7, 77n1, 78, 80, 82–4, 84n14, 85, 86–90, 86n17, 90n19, 91, 91n22, 93–7, 99–100, 100n4, 103, 103n12, 105n16, 105n17, 106–107, 107n21, 108, 110–111, 111n29, 113–14, 114n34, 117n40, 117n41, 120–21, 121n45, 122–23, 123n1, 123n2, 124–6, 126n8, 127– 9, 130n18, 131–2, 132n24, 133, 133n26, 133n28, 136–7, 140–41, 141n45, 142–4, 146, 147n58, 148–51, 150n3, 151–2, 154n8, 157, 157n13, 158, 158n16, 159, 159n18, 161, 161n21, 162–63, 164n29, 165–6, 166n36, 167–9, 167n41, 169n44, 170–71, 172n47, 173, 173n48, 174, 174n51, 177–8, 179n59, 180, 180n62, 181–2, 182n2, 182n3, 185n5, 186–7, 187n9, 188n14, 190–91, 191n23, 192–93, 195–7, 196n37, 198–200, 200n49, 202–204, 205n62, 206, 207n65, 209–10, 209n1, 210n2, 210n3, 211–12, 211n4, passim An Apology for Smectymnuus, 138, 172 Arcades, 133n27, 158 Areopagitica, 209, 209n1, 211 Colasterion, 112 Comus, A Masque Presented at Ludlow, 7n21, 21n51, 73, 74n31, 154–5, 165n34, 166n35, 189n15 De Doctrina Christiana, 94, 115–17, 117n40, 117n41, 141, 147n58, 194n30, 196n36, 200n49, 202n53 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 45, 112, 112n31 Elegia Prima, 19, 211 Elegia Septima, 2, 2n5, 2n7 Il Penseroso, 133n27 Lycidas, 133n27 On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, 6n17, 133n27

Paradise Lost, 2, 2n6, 2n8, 4, 6n16, 7–8, 10–15, 15n36, 16–17, 19, 21, 21n51, 23, 29, 31–2, 36, 38n33, 40, 41n40, 42n43, 44–5, 48, 48n54, 51, 53, 57– 8, 66, 67n26, 71, 75, 77, 79, 82–3, 84n14, 87, 89, 91n22, 93, 93n28, 94, 97n35, 101, 105, 107, 111–12, 115, 121, 123, 123n2, 123n3, 124–5, 127, 127n12, 128n13, 129n15, 130n18, 132, 134, 136–9, 141, 141n45, 144–5, 146n53, 149, 153–4, 157, 158n16, 159, 161n21, 164n29, 165–8, 174–5, 177, 178n57, 179, 180n62, 181, 185, 185n7, 186–7, 190–91, 195n32, 197, 200, 205–206, 210n2, 212; see also Adam; Death; Eve; Raphael; Satan; Sin Paradise Regained, 6n17, 159n18, 169, 191n24 Reason of Church-Government, 4, 210, 211 Of Reformation in England, 128 Samson Agonistes, 191n24 Tetrachordon, 43n44, 113, 114, 126, 126n8, 191n23 “To John Rouse, Librarian of Oxford University”, 211 Minerva, 170 Mirandola, Pico della, 109, 111 Moses, 5 Muretus, 8n22 Myrrha, 50, 93n28 Narcissus, 6n16, 7, 17–18, 23, 23n2, 24–9, 29n14, 30, 30n15, 31–3, 33n18, 33n20, 34–7, 37n27, 38, 38n33, 61, 61n14, 66n23, 67, 72, 77, 93n28, 95n32, 100, 117, 117n39, 120, 164n31, 181, 194, 207 Narrationes, commentary on Metamorphoses, 47n52 Neptune, 93n26 Nethersole, Sir Francis, 45n50 New Testament, 6, 196, 203 Newton, Bishop Thomas, 2n8, 140n44, 182, 190n20 Noah, 7n21, 203–204, 204n59 Old Testament, 6, 7, 196, 203

Index Olympus, 167n39 Orpheus, 26n8, 177–79, 179n61, 211 Ovid, 2n5, 2n6, 2n9, 3–5, 7–8, 8n22, 10–11, 11n26, 12, 14, 18, 23, 23n1, 23n2, 24n5, 25n6, 26n8, 27n10, 29, 31, 33n20, 34n21, 38n33, 39–40, 43, 46, 48, 53n1, 53n2, 54, 54n5, 54n6, 55n8, 56, 56n9, 57, 57n10, 60, 62, 64–5, 65n20, 66n23, 67n25, 69n28, 71–5, 75n32, 77, 79n4, 82–4, 84–9, 84n14, 91, 93, 93n26, 99n1, 100n3, 101–102, 102n6, 102n7, 103, 105, 105n17, 117, 124, 129, 129n17, 130, 130n17, 130n18, 131–2, 134n31, 136, 142, 143n48, 147, 149, 154, 157, 157n13, 160, 160n21, 161, 161n22, 162n23, 164, 164n31, 166, 166n36, 167n39, 167n40, 169, 171, 172n47, 175, 175n53, 176n54, 180, 180n62, 181–83, 183n4, 185n5, 186–88, 188n13, 189n16, 201, 203, 206, 206n64, 209–11, 209n1, 210–11, 211n4, passim Amores, 2n5, 54–56, 192n27 Ars Amatoria, 11, 65, 102, 105n17, 168n43, 190n19 Fasti, 78–81, 84n14, 95–6, 96n33, 100n3, 130n17, 161n22, 163, 170, 174n51, 175, 180n62 Heroides, 17 Metamorphoses, 1, 1n3, 2, 2n7, 2n8, 2n9, 4–7, 7n20, 7n21, 8, 10–13, 17, 19, 21, 21n51, 22–4, 26, 26n8, 28–9, 29n14, 30, 30n15, 31–3, 34n21, 36, 37n28, 38–40, 43, 48, 50–51, 53, 53n1, 54–6, 60–61, 61n14, 62–4, 63n16, 66, 66n23, 67, 67n25, 69, 71–4, 74n31, 75, 77, 77n1, 78, 78n2, 80, 83–4, 84n14, 89–93, 91n22, 91n24, 92, 93n26, 96–7, 100, 117, 129–30, 130n18, 132, 132n24, 134n31, 134n33, 135n34, 136–7, 139, 142–43, 143n48, 144n50, 149, 154n8, 157, 157n13, 160n21, 161, 161n22, 162–5, 166n37, 168, 171–2, 174, 174n50, 174n51, 175–7, 179–80, 180n62, 181–2, 182n3, 183–7,

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189n16, 192, 192n26, 195n34, 200, 202–203, 207, 209, 210n2, 211, passim Remedia Amoris, 57n10, 102n6 Tristia, 209, 210 Ovide Moralisé, 7n21 Palaephates, 8n22 Pales, 81, 154 Pallas, 174n51 Pan, 53n1, 105, 161 Pandora, 23, 26n8, 188n13 Paradise, 10, 14–15, 41n40, 48n55, 53, 60, 75, 77, 81, 83, 88, 95–7, 105, 111, 114, 114–34, 119, 123–4, 131–2, 139, 141n45, 151, 151n4, 161, 178, 182, 206; see also Eden, Garden of Paris, 101, 102, 121 Paul, 45n50, 103, 113, 126, 126n8, 149, 149n1, 149n2, 199 Pausanias, 29 Pearce, Zachary, 154, 177, 182 Perdita, 95n32, 175n53 Perkins, William, 15n34, 73, 126, 141, 151, 152 Persephone, 176 1 Peter, 204n59 Petrarch, Francesco, 73 Phillips, John (nephew of John Milton), 3 Philomela, 67, 67n25, 161n22 Phoebus Apollo, see Apollo Pisano, Andrea, 135n35 Plato, 47n53, 108, 108n24, 109–10 Platonism, 35, 108 Plotinus, 47, 111 Plutarch, 8n22 Pluto, 87, 175n52 Pomona, 18, 63, 63n16, 102, 102n6, 102n7, 123–4, 124n5, 124n6, 129n17, 130, 130n17, 130n18, 130n19, 133n26, 134, 134n31, 142–3, 143n48, 144n50, 154, 154n8, 157, 157n13, 158, 161–2, 162n23, 162n25, 163–5, 165n34, 166, 168, 176, 210n2 Pope, Alexander, 4 Powell, Mary (wife of John Milton), 90, 91n20 Propertius, 130n17

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Proserpina, 9n25, 19, 54n4, 61n13, 83–4, 84n14, 85, 85n15, 87–9, 94–5, 95n32, 96, 96n34, 97, 99–100, 108, 132n24, 153–4, 154n8, 167n39, 174, 174n51, 175, 175n52, 175n53, 176–7, 179b61, 180, 180n62, 181; see also Persephone Psalm 128, 125 Pygmalion, 17–18, 23–5, 25n6, 26–52, 26n8, 74, 93n28, 134n33, 189n16 Pyrrha, 7, 7n20, 7n21, 18, 23n1, 180–83, 183–7, 183n4, 188n13, 200–203, 203, 206 Python, 71 Quintilian, 3, 5, 131, 164n31 Ralegh, Walter, 5, 6, 15n34 Raphael, 43–6, 51, 59–60, 63, 68–9, 79, 79n5, 85–7, 93, 102, 104, 106, 108–11, 112n31, 114–16, 116n36, 116n37, 117, 122, 131, 133n26, 137, 137n39, 138, 143, 151, 157–8, 158n16, 159, 193n29, 195, 205n61 Reformation, 197, 199 Reformers, 13, 151, 152 Regius, Raphael, 8n22, 61, 62 Rochester, 141n46 Rogers, Daniel, 15n34, 71, 73, 126, 143n47, 151–2 Sabrina, 21n51 Salmacis, 135n34, 192n26 Samson, 191n24 Sandys, George, ix, 7–8, 23, 29, 31, 34, 34n21, 39n35, 40n38, 47–8, 50, 62, 64, 72, 73, 87, 92, 117, 130, 136, 143, 143n48, 149, 162–3, 165, 167, 167n40, 171, 174n50, 177, 183, 185, 185n7, 201 Satan, 6n17, 14–16, 16n40, 17, 22, 25, 27, 37n26, 38n34, 50, 50n57, 51, 67, 67n24, 67n26, 82n11, 84n14, 87, 90, 93, 97, 101n5, 102n10, 108, 114, 114n34, 115–16, 117n39, 117n41, 118–19, 119n44, 120, 137–8, 145, 149, 151, 154–5, 158n16, 159, 159n17, 160, 160n19, 160n20, 161–2, 162n26, 163–4,

164n29, 164n32, 165, 165n33, 166, 166n37, 167, 167n39, 168–9, 170n45, 171–4, 174n50, 174n51, 175, 180, 186, 189n17, 193, 193n28, 194–5, 197–8, 198n45, 199n47, 203, 206–207 Scipio, 167n39 Scylla, 89–91, 91n22, 91n24, 92, 92n25, 93–4, 93n26, 171–3 Secker, William, 16 Seneca, 110 Shakespeare, William, 95n32, 129, 162n26, 175n53, 188n12, 190 Sharpe, Joane, 114 Sidney, Sir Philip, 43n46 Silvanus, 161 Sin (in Paradise Lost), 21–2, 49–51, 66–7, 67n24, 67n26, 88–90, 90n18, 91, 91n23, 92n25, 93–4, 97, 145, 170n45, 171, 173, 174n51 Skylla, 91n22, 91n23; see also Scylla Sleeping Beauty, 25 Socrates, 47m53 Son (in Paradise Lost), 22, 42n41, 47, 79, 89, 120, 147, 180, 191, 193–4, 194n30, 196, 196n35, 197, 197n40, 205–207 Sowernam, Ester, 114n34 Spenser, Edmund, 15n34, 72, 73, 79, 100, 105, 105n18, 106, 152 Stephanus, 8n22 Stevens, Wallace, 77 Sylvester, Joshua, 15, 17, 24, 25, 57n11, 90n19, 103, 106, 123, 134n32, 150, 166n37 Syrinx, 53n1 Tasso, Toramato, 2, 100 Tellus, 93 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 191n21 Tereus, 67, 67n25 Tertullian, De Monogamia, 149n2 Theocritus, 161 Tiresias, 47 Titian, 104n15 Todd, Reverend Henry J., 2n8 Tomis, 211n4 Uriel, 164n29

Index Vaughan, Henry, 199 Venus, 24n5, 26, 43, 50, 56n9, 99–122, 99n1, 100, 100n3, 102n8, 103, 103n11, 104–105, 105n17, 105n18, 111, 116, 118, 150, 163, 170, 174n51, 181, 189n16 Vertumnus, 18, 63, 63n16, 130, 130n18, 130n19, 133n26, 143n48, 154n8, 157, 161–62, 162n23, 163–4, 164n32, 165, 165n33, 165n34, 166, 168, 210n2 Virgil, 1n3, 2, 2n7, 10–12, 54, 56n9, 124, 128, 131, 141–2, 155, 161

Vives, Juan Luis, 8n22 Ward, Dr., 2 Whatley, William, 15n34, 126, 190 Woodcock, Katherine (wife of John Milton), 90, 91n20 York, Duke of, 190 Zephon, 90n18 Zephyr, 78, 79, 81 Zeus, 96n34

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