Paradise Lost Book lV – Tape Transcript of the Lecture
Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00RKB0StzHY
Lecture: Professor John Rogers / Yale University
I
t is not until the fourth book of Paradise Lost that we see
finally represented before us the Paradise whose imminent lost is heralded so
grandly in the poem’s title. And
Milton’s task here is a difficult one. His
task is to represent unfallen Eden, Eden before the fall, to a fallen audience
of the 1660s from his own perspective as a fallen man himself – as a fallen
poet. Milton is continually confronting
he’s self-conscious about this predicament and continually confronting the
challenge posed by this essentially artistic predicament. But the predicament is not simply, although
it is this, an epistemological quandary, a problem about knowledge – how can
fallen man know anything about unfallen man.
There is more writing on this question than merely this question of how
we can possibly know what it was like in this unknowable state before the
fall. And it is more important than
simply that because everything is riding on Milton’s success of his
representation of an unfallen Eden. I think the theodicy, the success of
Milton’s attempt to justify the ways of God to men is hanging to some degree on
the success of his representation of unfallen-ness. And this is why because only if we can truly
see Paradise as unfallen can we really believe that Adam and Eve were in fact
perfectly capable of exercising their unfallen wills freely when confronted
with the temptation of the fruit. So
even so much as a hint of fallen-ness in a representation of Eden threatens to
indict God, threatens to impune God’s justice.
And because God can be said to have caused the fall, if he can be seen
to have insinuated into Paradise even the slightest propensity to fallenness
the question is an important one. So to
justify fully, the ways of God, this fallen poet has to represent to us, a
fallen audience, an Eden that is unmistakably unfallen. It is a huge challenge. Though unfallen Eden can’t be like anything
we know, it has to be utterly other from everything we are unfamiliar with
because of course everything we are familiar with is fallen; so one of the
dominant rhetorical strategies of the first two books has to be inverted to
some degree in Book lV. We have spent
some time talking about the similes, especially the similes at the beginning of
Milton’s poem. The simile used initially
in Paradise Lost is at some important junctures in Book lV especially
transformed into what we can think of as a dissimile – I am not sure that that
is a real rhetorical term…I didn’t make it up but in any case we’ll use it for
lack of a better word. So a positive
simile involves a construction that X is like Y. A dissimile would pose the opposite – X is
unlike Y. So I am going to ask you to
turn to the most famous of these dissimiles in Paradise Lost – line 268 of Book
lV. Milton is forced to describe – what
else can he do? – Paradise in terms of all the things that Eden is not. So he tells us:
Not that fair field 268
Of Enna… 269
Nor that sweet grove 272
Of Daphne by Orontes,… 273
Nor that Nyseian isle 275
Girt with the river Triton 276
It is quite a catalogue of things that Eden is not like and
the rhetorical mode is necessarily one of negation because of the
epistemological and artistic problem of the fallen representation of unfallen-ness. Look at line 233 this is where I think the
problem of a fallen representation of an unfallen state actually really comes
to a head. Milton is describing here the
four rivers of Eden
And now divided into four main
streams, 233
Runs diverse, wandering many a
famous realm
And country whereof here needs no
account, 235
But rather to tell how, if art could
tell,
How from that sapphire fount the crispèd
brooks, 237
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of
gold,
With mazy error under pendant shades 239
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and
fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise which not
nice art 241
In beds and curious knots, but
nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and
dale and plain, 243
The flowers in Paradise are poured forth not by a nice or a
fastidious gardener, by fastidious artifice – there is nothing fussy about this
garden. Its bounty is nature herself who has poured forth all this
profuseness. Eden is free of any
artifice but this lack of art in Eden of course only accentuates the problem
that the poet has no choice but to face.
That the poet is under a pressure to describe with what is of course his
poetic art that which is essentially indescribable. And Milton let us know the problem – if art
could tell – and that phrase clearly implies that art or even Milton’s art
can’t tell us what Eden was like – that Milton’s art can’t represent an
unfallen, non-artificial world with the instruments, the tools of fallen
artificial language. And the
impossibility that he is facing is nowhere so apparent as it is here in this
description of the crispèd brooks of Paradise – Rolling with mazy error under
pendant shades – now of course error is one of the most resonant words in the
entire poem. An error is the moral
category or we can think of it as the theological category most often applied
to the fall and Adam and Eve’s eventual sin.
We might very well wonder why it is that error has crept into Eden
before the fall. Its presence here on some
level could be seen as to doom the garden in advance; could be seen as some
kind of evidence of a degree of fallenness in this unfallen Eden. But Milton of course is using the word error
in a special sense. He is doing what he
does so often – he employs a word solely to invoke its etymological root sense
which in this case simply means wandering.
That the brook here is quite simply not flowing straight; it’s
divagating; it’s moving in a curvaceous form.
And Milton is working consciously to exclude the moral significance that
this word error had acquired later in its etymological history. He is attempting to block out the meaning of
this word that had crept in as it were after the fall. There is actually a wonderful book that looks
brilliantly at just this phenomenon called Milton’s Grand Style by the great
critic Christopher Ricks. And in that
book Ricks argues for the self-consciousness behind Milton’s employment of the
original etymological sense of some of the most loaded words in the poem. And so Milton will remind us of the fall with
his use of such a word as error. But at
the same time he is attempting to create in us, and it is a remarkable move, a
memory for a time in which a word like error had not yet been infected by its
morally pejorative modern connotation. He is reminding us of a time when there
was no such thing as moral error. Not
that we can be reminded because we can’t remember, we weren’t around but it is
as if a memory is being instilled in us by means of Milton’s poetry. He condenses into a single word what is
essentially the entire poetic problem besetting the description of unfallen
Eden. Milton too manages with a word
like this to remind us that we are only seeing the garden after Satan has
overleaped its boundary and has become sneaking around. And we are given no description of Eden,
you’ll note, until after the point in the story in which Satan has already
entered; crossed the boundaries of Paradise. Look at line 282 – Milton locates
the geographical spot on the grove believed to have been Eden but he does that
only to remind us that everything that we are seeing is precisely what Satan is
seeing.
Where the Fiend
282
Saw undelighted all delight, all
kind
Of living creatures, new to sight
and strange: 284
Satan’s presence is important here because he reminds us
that we too, are in a position undelighted all delight; we share his pained
alienation from the innocence of the garden.
And nowhere is the problem’s representation more urgent and more
troubled than in the first view that we are given of Adam and Eve. There is an extraordinary pressure on Milton
as he describes the condition of the unfallen Adam and Eve and that pressure
would unquestionably, I think, be felt by the poem’s original readers. Milton’s description of Adam and Eve and in
this respect it is like what I take to nearly every 17th century
description of Adam and Eve – it is necessary a political statement. It is an account of a first society. And as
an account of a first society, Milton’s Eden has to establish something like
the ideal against which all current, all fallen societies have to be
judged. So in the 17th century
- a description of man in the state of nature before the onset of any civil
government was an essential component of just about any political
philosophy. You couldn’t forward a
political vision without forwarding at the same time an image of a society
before the onset of the government. And
the most important political philosopher in mid 17th century England
is Milton’s slightly older contemporary Thomas Hobbes and he had founded his
vision of politics which was a decidedly authoritarian vision of politics on
just such an account of a nearly unrecoverable, unrememberable past. And so in Hobbes Leviathan, Hobbes conjures
an image of the original man in the state of nature that serves as the
foundation for his political wisdom, for his truly outrageous thesis that the
only viable political institution is that of an absolutist monarchy. And I say it is outrageous perhaps because it
is so incredibly compelling – it is very hard not to be converted to a
terrifying form of authoritarianism when you read Hobbes’s iron-clad prose. So in the famous chapter 13 of the 1st
book of Leviathan Hobbes describes the
riotous mayhem constitutive of life before the onset of political
institutions. And so interesting and
importantly, Hobbes is forwarding here a kind of secular argument; this isn’t
theological and so he doesn’t return us to the Genesis account of Adam and
Eve. His is the state of nature he tells
us is just like the one inhabited…it is America…it’s the one inhabited by the
savages of the Americas. The purpose of
the Hobbsian account is directly analogous, I think, to Milton’s purpose in
describing Eden. For Hobbes men in the
state of nature are all equal. The state
of nature is an egalitarian one even with respect to sex and Hobbes does
everything he can do to demonstrate the dangers of this natural egalitarianism
because, Hobbes tells us. all men and women were created equal. There is no authority to keep them in place,
to keep them from what naturally would be a perpetual state of strife. And so Hobbes explains in Chapter 13 without a common power, (and by common power he means
a king, a prince, a tyrant, it doesn’t matter) man is
in a state of war, such a war as is of every man against every man. And the life of the natural man (and
this is surely the most famous and most glorious sentence in all of Hobbes
remarkable leviathan) is solitary poor, nasty, brutish
and short. So for Hobbes the
egalitarianism established in nature is obviously unsatisfactory and has to be
corrected and so we have to construct some kind of governmental structure of
polity whereby we submit ourselves to an absolute ruler, a monarch, a tyrant,
it doesn’t matter. And Hobbes Leviathan
must have been deeply troubling to Milton, who devoted so much of his career to
the critique of just the kind of absolutist government that Hobbes is
championing. There are a lot of signs in
Paradise Lost that Milton is countering his great contemporary Thomas
Hobbes.
Now one of the advantages of writing about Eden was that a
description of Paradise as I have suggested was something like an implicit
model for political philosophy. It is
certainly, in Milton’s hands. So Hobbes had used his description of the state
of men in the state of nature to forward his authoritarianism. So Milton has to use his description of the
first couple to forward his cause which is essentially that of republicanism or
some kind of non-monarchic government.
And Adam and Eve have to be able to form a successful society alone, a
successful polity on their own without the dictatorial intervention of any
sovereign power. It is crucial for what
Milton needs to argue politically. So
what exactly are Milton’s politics? It
has been a while since we have visited this topic. We haven’t really discussed
Milton’s politics since we looked at the 1644 Areopagitica and a lot, I’m sad
to say, has changed since then. In
Areopagitica we saw Milton affirm what was essentially the general equality of
all human beings. This was an implicit
argument that all individuals have been endowed by God with reason and that
they are all equally capable of choosing and reasoning for themselves. But in the 1650s, Milton had grown
considerably less optimistic in his sense of the equality of all men and
women. The average individual in England
for Milton at this point didn’t in fact seem to be endowed with quite as much
reason and capacity for rational choice as Milton felt that he was capable of.
Or as Milton felt that he and his fellow Puritan Revolutionaries were capable
of. So many of Milton’s backsliding
countrymen wanted their king back; a devastating cultural fact for Milton. And so Milton began to develop a new
political philosophy and something of an aristocratic philosophy of political
society that places superior, more rational, more spiritually minded beings,
people like John Milton, at the top of this society and they are necessarily
above less rational, less excellent, less spiritually minded beings who are
obviously in a lower stratum. And so
Milton’s later political philosophy sketches something like almost a natural
hierarchy in which the rational elite are in a position to guide and to offer
some sort of authoritative wisdom to the less rational members of the
society. And these less rational members
ideally willingly yield to superior wisdom and the reason of the rational
elite. It seems to be this later vision
of a kind of a naturally hierarchical society that forms the basis for the
first polity which is that of Adam and Eve in Milton’s Eden. And it goes without saying that the union of
Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise is a patriarchal one and the hierarchical
division between superior and inferior creatures has been marked almost
entirely, exclusively along the lines of gender. Now Milton as you know has been reviled for
his unrepentant patriarchalism of the first couple. Look at line 299 – one of the most famous
lines in the poem. Milton is talking
about the purpose of Adam and Eve’s creation.
He for God only, she for God in
him: 299
This is without question a sexist vision of the first
polity. We can say that I think without
much hesitation but it would almost be criminal, and I really believe this, to say
that Milton’s sexism is simplistic. It
is so complex in fact that Milton has included in his poem a number of
competing ways to think about this first society and we actually have
passionately expressed before us in Paradise Lost the old Milton, the younger
Milton, the much more liberal Milton – that radical egalitarianism that he was
able so forcibly and compellingly to voice in Areopagitica. That voice is audible in Paradise Lost but we
also of course have the later Milton, the believer in a hierarchical
society. You can hear these
contradictions at work in the poem’s description of this first polity; that of
the union of Adam and Eve. So look at
line 288
Two of far nobler shape, erect and
tall, 288
God-like erect, with native honour
clad
In naked majesty, seemed lords of
all, 290
And worthy seemed; for in their
looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker
shone, 292
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and
pure,
Severe but in true filial freedom
placed; 294
Whence true authority in men;
Now it certainly strikes me to be the case that this first
view that we get of Adam and Eve is an egalitarian one. They are both in their naked majesty
described as lords of all. But their
seeming equality is a source of no small anxiety to Milton. So we are told almost immediately he can’t
take it anymore. We are told that
…though both
295
Not equal, as their sex not equal
seemed;
For contemplation he and valour
formed, 297
For softness she and sweet
attractive grace,
Well up to this point there sex did equal seem and it is
here that Milton places an enormous amount of weight on this word ‘seemed’ –
one of the most important words in Book lV.
Seemed not equal to whom? The
idea of seeming is always with respect to a perceiver; someone to whom
something seems to be this or that. It
is with this word seemed that we are reintroduced to the subject of the fallen
perspective of an unfallen scene and reminded that we are not granted anything
like the purview of Eden until after Satan has entered the garden. This description of Eden in Book lV has in
fact been merely tracing Satan’s steps and this description of Adam and Eve
merely emerges now because this is the scene that Satan happens now to be
looking at. Look at line 285
…where the fiend 285
Saw undelighted all delight, all
kind
Of living creatures new to sight and
strange: 287
Then you have a colon.
Then after this colon falls this long description of Adam and Eve. It is just possible to read the entire
description of the sexually hierarchized Adam and Eve as an account in
something like indirect discourse of Satan’s fallen perspective. If their sex not equalled ‘seemed’ it’s
possible that their sex not equalled ‘seemed’ to Satan. And it is Satan, of course, we know this
already to be the case who is more concerned than any of the other poem’s
characters with problems of inequality. So naturally this is going to be the
predisposition, the set of concerns he brings to any polity. It is a fascinating question and there is a
considerable debate raging – if you can say that Milton is a rage – a debate
among Miltonists on just this question – and it is an interesting one. Milton’s position at the head of the English
literary canon is often associated or has been since the late 70s with his
insistent positioning or maybe actually since Virginia Woolf’s writings in the
20s and 30s, is often associated with his insistent positioning of Adam over
Eve in Paradise Lost. And some
participants in the debates about the validity of the western literary canon
have imagined the effects of sexism in our society, have imagined eradicating
sexism in our society by eradicating from college reading lists a sexist poet
like Milton. That argument is made, it
is still forwarded today and it’s an argument that poses, as you can imagine,
an understandable threat to people like me and admirers of this poet. And you can imagine the number of Miltonists,
he was really quite remarkable, who rallied around the textual suggestion that
when Milton said “he for God only, she for God in him’ he doesn’t really mean
it. I think it was in the mid 80s that a
critic first hit on the theory that all of the descriptions of Adam and Eve
could be seen as merely an exfoliation of Satan’s perspective and there was
tremendous joy and excitement in the Milton community. Once that idea had been floated it’s as if
the narrator is just reproducing for us the hierarchical imagination of Satan
whose perspective on Adam and Eve is the one we are getting at the moment. And so we are able to say to ourselves
comfortably and complacently that Milton isn’t telling us that the social
organisation of Eden is sexist; Milton is telling us that Satan is sexist. And that patriarchy is essentially satanic
rather than Miltonic. I get depressed
when I think of critical positions like this – whether you have the extreme
position like Milton as the inventor, the prime perpetrator of misogyny (contempt
of women) on one hand or the counter vision of Milton as an early feminist on
the other. The case is obviously more
complicated than that and it’s more interesting than that because it is not all
that clear just in the passage that we’re looking at; it’s not clear whose
voice is actually authorising these lines that authorise the patriarchal
perimeters of unfallen society. Without
a doubt we have the narrator speaking here and presumably he is representing
something like the official line of the poem but Milton does in fact go out of
his way to situate the entire scene as an elaboration of Satan’s
perspective. Both of these things are
true and this passage which has absolutely everything to do with what Milton calls
‘establishing the true authority of men’.
This passage refuses to establish its own authority; it refuses to
announce itself as the product of either the poem’s narrator or Satan. It is a moment of textual instability and it
reflects the larger political instability that is threatening Eden; threatening
the relation between Adam and Eve. And
so it is worth asking ourselves, what is it about Adam and Eve that makes them
seem unequal. Look at line 297
For contemplation he and valour
formed, 297
For softness she and sweet
attractive grace,
How do we know this?
We know this by their physical differences. We know it by the appearance of their
anatomies and more precisely than that, we know they are different and unequal
by means of our perception of their hair
His fair large front and eye sublime
declared 299
Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly
hung 301
Clustering, but not beneath his
shoulders broad:
Milton did wear his hair long but he wants us to know that
that was part of the historical record and he was very pleased with that but he
always wants us to know that it wasn’t too long. And it’s the same with Adam who wears his
hair unusually long but indecorously long.
She as a veil down to the slender
waist 303
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets
waved 305
As the vine curls her tendrils,
which implied
Subjection,… 307
Now, I bet that we can all agree that a description of their
hair is not what we were expecting at this moment. Supporters of patriarchy, or the superiority
of men have always enlisted the anatomical differences between the sexes as
proof of man’s rightful ability to subject or subordinate women. A fact central to the patriarchal prejudice,
as you can imagine, seems to be the strength differential between men and
women. And so if Milton had imagined a
cosmos that privileged physical strength, then we would have no choice but
glumly to accept the fact that Adam is indeed superior to Eve. And you can how an argument like this could
have played out in the pages of Paradise Lost.
Milton could have easily argued that human excellence could be
determined by the sheer number of shrubs Adam and Eve were able to prune on any
given day. And so Adam would be able to prove his superiority but physical
strength, and this is important, means absolutely nothing in Paradise
Lost. In fact if anything, Milton is
always denigrating the importance of physical strength. So given that we still have to ask the
question – why try to argue for the inequality of the sexes on the basis of
hair length? I presume none of you have
had children but you probably still know nonetheless men and women or boys and
girls are not born with distinct or distinguishable heads of hair. At least until male-pattern baldness sets in,
the hair of men and women are distinct or distinguishable and if anything
male-pattern baldness probably gives women an edge. And if Milton wanted to use hair as a natural
sign of sexual difference, he should be discussing, I would think facial
hair. Adam’s superiority presumably
could be evinced by his commanding beard; we could imagine Milton doing
that. Something that Eve lacks by virtue
of her anatomy but the hair on the head?
This doesn’t make any sense. The
hair on the head is in fact one of the few anatomical features that is
absolutely gender neutral. Our hair is
gendered by the virtue of the barber not by virtue of the creator. Which brings us to this fact, which we all
know, which is what every obstetrician knows, the obvious distinguishing
anatomical characteristic is genitalia.
Milton does actually mention Adam and Eve’s mysterious parts but he
mentions them only to dismiss their difference.
He may be gesturing to something like – you tell me if this is crazy – a
genital difference when he describes Adam’s hair. ‘His locks manly hung / clustering’ – I don’t
think that holds. The sexual signifier
that hangs manly off of Adam’s body and that signifier which has traditionally
of course been invoked as a sign of sexual superiority is Adam’s penis. But Milton alludes to this genital signifier,
of difference, their mysterious parts, only to dismiss it. He chooses instead for the distinguishing
characteristic of the sexes a phenomenon that is rooted not in nature but in
culture – hairline. Like Hobbes, Milton
is under a tremendous cultural pressure when he describes the earliest state of
nature. The description of nature has to
bear the weight of all of the social and all of the political claims that the
poem makes. And the set of social
conditions that Milton has to justify and to make seem natural is a
particularly tricky one. Both Eve and
Adam have to be seen as absolutely free; each of them has to be capable of
exercising reason and making reasonable and rational decisions. And in this sense Adam and Eve enjoy
something like the absolutely egalitarianism world, the structure of the
political world that we had seen in a treatise like Areopagitica. Milton at his most exuberantly liberal but
while Adam and Eve enjoy all the rights of an egalitarian society as they do in
Paradise Lost, they are not therefore equal.
Adam appears to be superior to Eve and Milton will only tell us that he
appears as such. The narrator cannot
make this claim in anything like a more declarative sense. So on the basis of at least their appearances,
the social formation in Eden is strictly hierarchical. And on some extraordinary level this poem is
trying to have it both ways. So much of
the energy of the account of Paradise derives from Milton’s contradictory
account of the political structure of Eden.
He applies to the Edenic society of Adam and Eve, what I take to be two
irreconcilable modes of social governance.
Eden is once egalitarian, its inhabitants are in naked majesty they are
lords of all; both of them; Adam and Eve are entirely free in
self-determining. But at the same time
Eden is structured as an aristocracy where the male class is deemed
categorically genetically superior to the female class. It goes without saying that the situation is
untenable. The contradictory social
formation of Paradise is inherently unstable and I am convinced that nothing is
more important in our understanding of the dynamics of the fall than these
principles; the principle that Eve is absolutely free and equally rational,
equally capable of rational and virtuous choices but also the conflicting
principle that Eve is, to some extent, subject to Adam’s authority. And
contradictory political impulses in the poem are brilliantly worked out in the
first description of Adam and Eve. Look
at line 305, it is unbelievable. Look at
what Milton is able to establish by way of a description of Eve’s hair. It is here in a representation of her hair
that the nature of the Edenic polity is established.
Her unadornèd golden tresses
wore 305
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets
waved
As the vine curls her tendrils,
which implied 307
Subjection, but required with gentle
sway,
And by her yielded, by him best received, 309
Yielded with coy submission, modest
pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous
delay. 311
The conflicting politics of Eden are best captured by means
of the rhetorical strategy of oxymoron or the contradiction in terms. Milton packs this description of this first
couple’s – this is essentially an erotic play that is being described before us
and it is packed with oxymoronic descriptions.
Milton is trying to communicate the incredibly delicate political
balance of this hierarchical society.
The society may be hierarchical Milton is telling us but it is not
authoritarian. Eve may be subject to
Adam, who holds authority over Eve, but her subjection – because she is free –
is required with a gentle sway. And no
sooner does Adam exercise his authority by gently swaying Eve, then she
willingly yields to him, exercising her free capacity for consent – her
capacity to choose to be swayed by her superior. So Eve’s hair seems to imply subjection but
Eve’s hair also seems to imply freedom and a kind of resistance to
subjection. Eve yields not with
submission, Milton would never permit himself to say that; Eve yields with coy
submission; she holds something back even as she grants it. We have detailed before us the endless give
and take that this delicate political structure requires. For Milton, this give and take is not only
the basis of a society, it is the basis for eros or sexual pleasure. With that extraordinary phrase “sweet
reluctant amorous delay” Milton is able to pack into three adjectives into one
noun the pleasure derivable by both parties in Eve’s exercise of
resistance. But Eve’s coyness isn’t just
sexy for Milton, it is also politically meaningful. From a political perspective her capacity for
a kind of reluctance and resistance serves as a guarantee for her capacity for
a kind of rational consent. And it is
also theologically resonant; from a theological perspective, Eve’s willingness
to resist, to delay constitutes a guarantee of her divinely granted free-will. Eve cannot be forced to do anything and it’s
as if this little dance that they perform in the quotidian life of unfallen
Eden. Eve is practising in a small way
for that crucial moment in temptation in which her ability to resist and delay
will mean the difference between life and death.
Now we as readers find it difficult, we should find it
difficult to find a theory of hierarchy on something so fragile and so easily
alterable as hair length. But what’s
even more amazing than that is the fact that the nature of the gendered
hierarchy of Adam and Eve isn’t even evident to Adam and Eve themselves. This blows me away; look at Eve’s first memory
in Paradise Lost line 477, Eve is far from being able to recognise Adam’s
superiority immediately and Eve there is certainly nothing in the length of his
hair that suggests that he might enjoy a kind of authority over her. In fact to Eve, Adam seems to be a noticeably
inferior creature when she compares him to that image of herself – that
beautiful and responsive image of herself that she had found in the pool.
Till I espied thee, fair indeed and
tall, 477
Under a platan, yet methought less
fair
Less winning soft, less amiable
mild, 479
Than that smooth watery image;
It’s like the dissimile of the fair field of Enna, Adam can
only be understood by what it is he lacks and indeed it is a lack of anything
that is a natural or a self-evident sexual hierarchy that constitutes one of
the central problems in Paradise Lost.
Hierarchy is not a natural fact in Paradise. It is an arbitrarily imposed social
institution. It has been imposed by God
but it hasn’t been built into the structure of the natural world. And it is to Milton’s great credit, I mean
this with the utmost seriousness, that he labours to expose the artificial
cultural origins of the sexual subjection that at the same time he is
championing and celebrating. Eve has to
be told that Adam is her superior and she has to undergo an elaborate process,
a complicated process of cultural indoctrination. Nowhere in the description of Eden are we
reminded more forcibly of our incapacity to understand unfallen nature than in
Milton’s description of Eve’s hair. “Her
unadornèd tresses were dishevelled but in wanton ringlets waved” Dishevelled
and wanton – these seem like extraordinary prejudicial adjectives and they cast
a moral judgement, it is seemed to readers from the very beginning, long before
she has sinned. Once again Milton is
playing with that analogy. This is
Rick’s point – dishevelled is being used here in its original, literal sense –
it literally means hair let down and the ringlets – she is not wearing a bun –
are wanton – that they are simply unrestrained.
And the fact that we are so eager as readers to supply a kind of loose
or sexual meaning to these words implicates us Milton perhaps is seen to be
saying. And of course it implicates
Satan as well. In the fallen perspective
of the ultimately mysterious union of Adam and Eve, we are eyeing them askance
and leering at them just as Satan is.
And it is Stanley Fish’s argument, and it is not unconvincing, that
Milton’s purpose in employing these loaded adjectives is to force the reader to
acknowledge her own fallenness; to remind us all of the inadequacy of our
fallen perspective on this unfallen nature.
So we are wrong to import a kind of moral prejudice to the words
‘dishevelled’ and ‘wanton’ but Milton will push it even further. Eve’s hair is also waving and insinuating and
its waving curly motion resembles nothing so much as that other much less noble
creature in the garden and that’s of course the serpent. Look at line 345 where Milton describes the
elephant and the serpent
…the unwieldy elephant
345
To make them mirth used all his
might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis; close the
serpent sly 347
Insinuating, wove with Giordian
twine
His braided train, and of his fatal
guile 349
Gave proof unheeded;
The braided train of the serpent’s wavy motion resembles
nothing so much as the waving braids of Eve’s hair. And Eve seems to be associated well in
advance of the actual temptation with the sly insinuation of the serpent. An association that can of course can only
damage any sense that we have of her unfallen reason and her genuine
free-will. But Milton carefully includes
in this description another example of a waving and an insinuating motion in
Eden and that’s the elephant’s proboscis.
He’s preface his connection between Eve and Satan here with the
inclusion of the elephant. He wants us
to know with this image of the elephant’s light proboscis that the motion of
waving and weaving and weaving and insinuating are still in fact entirely
innocent and it will only be Satan’s subsequent actions that infect them
retroactively, infect them for us. The
problem being exposed once again is the problem of representation. How can you represent an unfallen state from
a fallen perspective?
Figure 1 Rembrandt, Adam and Eve,
1638
http://www.rembrandthuis.nl/index.php?item=150&lang=en
|
This representation of Adam and Eve
was made in 1638 – Rembrandt did this drawing shortly before Milton was
beginning to think of Paradise Lost. And
in the Rembrandt representation, this is a devastating critique of 17th
century desire to represent an unfallen Paradise – what we have Milton trying
to do. Like Milton, Rembrandt exposes
the impossibility I think of such a representation. If we read the Book of Genesis, we know that
Eve was alone with the serpent and so we are seeing Adam and Eve in this
picture presumably after Eve has eaten the fruit but before Adam had eaten
it. Now Adam may not have eaten the
fruit but he certainly looks as fallen as Eve – they are equally physically
ugly – it seems to me and that is indisputable.
Nasty, brutish and short – it is as if they have crawled out of the
pages of the famous chapter 13 of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Look at Eve’s face, with its broad
overhanging brows – she suggests the unevolved state of an upright primate than
she does of the glorious and beautiful first human female. And look at Adam – the presumably unfallen
Adam is writhing in a twisted and guilty posture that gives him no moral
superiority over Eve whatsoever. If anything
here, Adam’s hair seems more wanton and more dishevelled than Eve’s. Rembrandt’s Eden must be very humid – there’s
a frizzy split end thing going on with both of them – especially with Eve. At least it is falling rather neatly over
her head which can’t be said of Adam.
And of course the primary clue that this representation of Eden is
imposing upon unfallen Adam’s sense of fallenness comes from Rembrandt’s
shading of their genitals. And actually
in the original you can make their genitalia quite distinctly but they are
nonetheless shaded; this is important for Rembrandt. They are partially hidden by the dark and
guilty shadow produced by the serpent.
The serpent, you may or may not have noticed, it is that scaly hideous
creature climbing that tree on the right.
Milton had gone out of his way to insist that the genitals of Adam and
Eve the mysterious parts were not concealed but then he goes on to censure us
his fallen readers for the sense of guilty shame that we bring to any
speculation about their mysterious parts.
But it is as if Rembrandt is a step ahead of Milton and he is telling us
that there can be no such thing as a just representation of an unfallen
nudity. Our darkened minds will
continually shade that nudity with the inescapable shadow of guilt and shame
that we have no choice but to bring to questions of sexuality. Rembrandt joins Milton in representing a
scene that seems to lie somewhere – both the Eden of Rembrandt and the Eden of
Milton – between a fallen and an unfallen state. And I think a lot of energy of the Rembrandt
drawing derives from his refusal to depict the moral superiority of one sex
over the other. There is no clear
demarcation here of a sexual hierarchy or a natural sexual hierarchy. This Adam doesn’t seem any physically
stronger than Eve and if he is to be seen as the greater sex, perhaps it is
because he has placed himself in an arbitrarily physical posture of superiority
– he’s placed one foot slightly on an elevated plane. He is trying to get a leg up. He is compensating perhaps for his lack of a
self-evident authority over Eve.
Tradition of course has always insisted and this story that we inherit
as children, that Eve seduced Adam into eating the fruit. Adam would never have fallen if Eve hadn’t
tricked him into eating the apple or implored him to join her sin. But Rembrandt here is refusing to attribute
all of the guilt to Eve. Now it is
possible that Adam may be here trying to protect Eve from the fruit with the
gesture of his hand but he also might be reaching for the fruit, grabbing
it. It is possible that he’s seizing the
fruit just as Milton’s Adam seizes Eve when he finds her by the pool. So what I am saying is that the suggestion in
both Milton and Rembrandt is that the fall had less to do with Eve’s seduction
of Adam than the more foundational, or the structural problem of sexual
inequality. The fall starts to look more
and more like the inevitable consequence of sexual hierarchy. I am going to conclude after we take one more
final look at the Rembrandt. At the
visual details that Rembrandt forces into a kind of analogous relation. And in this he is like Milton. Like Milton, Rembrandt draws into the
relation, an analogous relation of the slithery awful serpent and innocent
playful winding of the elephant’s proboscis.
And you can see the unwieldy elephant in the lower right-hand corner of
the Rembrandt drawing. But the proboscis
and the serpent’s tail are not the only snaky things in Rembrandt’s Eden. As I mentioned earlier, in the original
drawings, Adam’s mysterious part is actually quite visible. It is nasty, it’s brutish, it’s short, but t’s
discernible. And it is important that it
is discernible and through this technique of juxtaposition Rembrandt casts an
evil and satanic shadow over this part of Adam’s anatomy; that distinguishing
feature of his sex which is the arbitrary signifier of his authority over
Eve. So Adam’s authority here, in its
most intimate manifestation, may be as complicit as the serpent in the crime of
the fall. So Satan sees all of this; he
sees this weird and bizarrely unstable sexual hierarchy in Milton’s Eden and
what does he say at line 521. Milton has
Satan announce that he has ‘Eureka! I know how I am going to do it’. He has arrived at his scheme to destroy Adam
and Eve and he says – just having witnessed all of this –
O fair foundation laid whereon to
build 521
Their ruin! Hence I will excite
their minds
With more desire to know, and to
reject 523
Envious commands, invented with
design
To keep them low whom knowledge
might exalt 525
Equal with gods; aspiring to be
such,
They taste and die: what likelier
can ensue? 527
Now Milton isn’t eager to join Satan in his claim of God’s
injustice but he is willing to expose the inherently unstable foundation of
Eden’s sexual hierarchy. Milton lays the
foundation ultimately - I think, we will see as we read Book lX – for our understanding
of some of the deepest causes of the fall.
[End of Lecture]
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