Milton's Eve and Adam: A Study on Two Ways of Reading Paradise Lost, Study Guides, Projects, Research of English Language

Download Milton's Eve and Adam: A Study on Two Ways of Reading Paradise Lost and more Study Guides, Projects, Research English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 46, No. 1, Spring 2004 © 2004 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713–7819 Miltonic Marriage and the Challenge to History in Paradise Lost David Mikics In book 5 of Paradise Lost, Milton’s Eve is visited in sleep by “one shaped and winged like one of those from heaven” (5.55): Satan. She is brought before the forbidden tree, its fruit waved in her face. Reporting her dream to Adam after she awakes, she says “The pleasant savoury smell / So quickened appetite, that I, methought, / Could not but taste” (5.84–86). (The actual event of tasting is elided, replaced by a thought.) At the con- clusion of her dream, Eve takes flight with Satan: Forthwith up to the clouds With him I flew, and underneath beheld The earth outstretched immense, a prospect wide And various: wondering at my flight and change To this high exaltation (5.86–90) Eve seems both thrilled and horrified by her aerial ride. Her main feeling, though, is relief. “Suddenly,” she says, My guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down, And fell asleep; but O how glad I waked To find this but a dream! (5.90–93) During their morning-after conversation about this dream, Eve gains an interpretive guide: Adam. He first dismisses the dream as “wild work,” a mere mismatching of shapes produced by fancy, and then decides that the dream means that Eve will avoid the disobedience they have been warned about. He says hopefully, and mistakenly, “What in sleep thou didst abhor to dream, / Waking thou never wilt consent to do” (5.120–21). Eve in her dream feels trouble; Adam explains it (and tries to explain it away). “Abhor,” his word for her reaction to the dream-flight, does not capture the depth and strangeness of her feeling. She sees a “prospect 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM20 21Miltonic Marriage wide / and various,” at once exhilarating and frightening. Adam, submitting her confused apprehension to theory, informs her about, first, the way dreams are constructed, and then what this dream might signify. In the episode of Eve’s dream, Paradise Lost seems to be suggesting that the difference between this husband and this wife is, at least in part, the gap between Eve’s vulnerable, troubled enjoyment and Adam’s effort to make sense of this enjoyment by warding off its immediacy, by giving a theory of it that reduces its bewildering impact. This moment in book 5 suggests that Adam and Eve might stand for two ways in which we read Paradise Lost. On the one hand, we follow Eve in her bold susceptibility to experience. On the other, we ally ourselves to Adam’s wariness about ex- perience, and his guarded loyalty to God’s commands. (In book 9 Eve will, disastrously, out-argue Adam, as she makes the case for the good- ness of experiential trial.) Taking a close look at the distinction between Eve and Adam will enable us to understand Miltonic marriage as it has not been understood before. In Paradise Lost married union is based on a crucial impossibility, the permanent difference between our first parents that makes up their bond. The image of Edenic marriage in Milton—more specifically, the way that this marriage depends on the elusive character of Eve—is a way of resisting history. New historicists characteristically want to see poetic meaning as a response to historical circumstances, so that the union of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost becomes, in their hands, a statement about the development of bourgeois marriage. This essay tries to open a path beyond the historicist imprisoning of Milton’s work. I argue that the cre- ative impulse in Milton embodies en avant an argument against the critical tradition that constrains, and sometimes distorts, a character like Eve by reducing her to historical significance. I begin with some discus- sion of recent Milton criticism as it bears on my theme. I will then return to Milton’s text and consider a series of episodes in Paradise Lost, begin- ning with the conversation between Adam and the angel Raphael in book 8, and ending with the separation scene in book 9. My aim is to formulate a challenge to historicist readings, in the inter- est of being true to Milton. I see Milton’s project as antihistorical: as one that gives us, in the poetic character of Eve and her relation to Adam, a way of challenging the realm of social history and politics. Paradise Lost is about the entry of humans into history, but because it asserts that this entry is only partly successful, partly achieved, it argues against the incli- nation to see ourselves as completely subject to historical force. The peculiar contention at the center of Adam and Eve’s union pro- vides the resistance to the historicist readings that would explain this union from the outside. Knowing Edenic marriage, by reading Milton’s poem, means realizing that it cannot be assimilated to the social conventions that 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM21 David Mikics24 Both McColley and Fish court peculiar dangers. McColley evades the question of why God’s power over creation takes such an inflexible and commanding, such an illiberal, form. Fish bends in the opposite direction and idolizes God’s rigorous power. My aim is not to heal this rift between authoritarians and liberals, Adam and Eve critics, but rather to reevaluate it, in order to see how Milton imagines an Edenic marriage whose perfec- tion is also a kind of impossibility. The division between man and woman that visibly opens as we read Paradise Lost appears insuperable, despite critics’ desire to close it, because Eve seems more fundamentally related to her own enjoyment than to Adam’s. As a result, the unfallen nuptial equilibrium that Turner evokes, and that we wish for in our reading of the poem, becomes harder to imagine than has been thought. Eve incorporates the mystery of attraction’s authority, in unfallen Eden as in our world: how another person holds or turns you with his speech, or catches you with her eye, and so with her soul. For Adam, Eve herself is the alluring, inescapable object of desire; but for Eve, this object eventually, and disastrously, turns out to be the tree of knowledge—an asymmetry that wrecks the Edenic balance. (Yet Eve’s desire cannot be fully identified with her inclination toward the fruit in book 9; Milton leaves decisively open the connections between what she wants, who she is, and the catastrophic fulfillment she faces in book 9.) Eve does not par- ticipate in the law, but instead exposes a fateful gap in it: her specialness or superiority, which is a palpable fact to Adam, does not, and cannot, make sense to him. This gap, the incomplete character of Edenic order, seems inevitable, and can be understood as a lack of fit between the prin- ciple of order and those who occupy it. Such misconnection leads to what Raphael, during his lengthy warning to Adam in book 8, calls Adam’s “overestimation” of Eve. But the same problem also occurs with Milton’s praise of the Father (his overestimation of God?). The Father, in his strenuous efforts in book 3 to justify his creation, inevitably implies a dis- junction (and therefore a living relation) between the strict universal order he commands, which will be inhabited by sin and punishment, and his original character as a creator, and approving judge, of endless good. This episode of book 3, the Father’s reflection on his own role in Paradise Lost, haunts the most powerful recent defender of Miltonic theodicy, Dennis Danielson, in his remarkable book Milton’s Good God (1982). Adapting an idea of the Russian theologian Nicolas Berdiaev, Danielson argues that the Father himself suffers, since he must allow man to fall. Like the Father himself, his creatures enjoy—and are subjected to—a freedom that has existed from the beginning of time, even before the creation (Danielson, 31–32). In this way Danielson defends the Father against William Empson’s accusation (in Milton’s God [1961]) that he is merely playing a sadistic game with mankind by staging a test that he 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM24 25Miltonic Marriage knows humans will fail. Instead, Danielson implies, Milton’s God re- mains subject to the rules of the universe he has created: a universe that, with the fall first of Satan and then of Eve and Adam, takes its own course, toward corruption and away from original goodness. To put the matter in standard doctrinal terms: Danielson shows us that Milton is an Arminian, not a Calvinist. God cannot simply, or forcibly, prevent sin and evil; that is not the way his universe works.4 I will suggest later on that Empson’s challenge to Milton’s God as a cruel and forceful manipulator of events cannot be quite this easily dismissed. Though Danielson is right in his solution to the theodicial problem in Milton, Empson responds more fully, and therefore more Miltonically, to our sense of the problem, whose dramatic expression cannot be separated from its meaning. Yet Empson’s bold caricatural strokes also fall short, since they free us from the problem prematurely. Danielson is on to something in his insistence that God, though om- nipotent, is also an actor in the drama he has created, that he too must undergo humanity’s fall. Like Milton’s God the Father, human fathers only occupy a place, play a role, and their authority depends on acknowl- edging a difference between the role and the actual person who performs it. Our fathers are all-too-human, mere vehicles, rather than sources, of symbolic efficacy. (But is it possible to find fault in the Father’s function, in the idea of Milton’s God, without finding fault in that God himself?) Our relation to our parents, including our first parents, Adam and Eve, can be seen as a quest for perfect authority that can never find satis- faction. The child’s wisdom, when it comes, lies in the embrace of this lack, in the renunciation of the reassurance that would have been pro- vided by the parent’s complete attention, complete knowledge, and complete protection against the uncertainty of life. When we give up this reassurance, we realize that the world’s structure necessarily precedes any particular person who fills a place in it. For the parents, having authority means, not incarnating it, but seriously playing their part. And playing the part means knowing, at some level, that such incarnation can never actually take place. This failure of incarnation, this lack at the center of authority, is, then, a necessity of authority’s working. But it can also be a traumatic discovery on the part of the subject who started out by relying on this authority as an integral, naively embodied presence. Growing up requires the disturb- ing realization that authority cannot be embodied, or literally present (except in a vision of messianic salvation). We may deny the impossibility, by fantasizing a conspiratorial force that pulls all the strings, controls the universe. In the great speech that follows her fall, Eve voices such a para- noid or conspiratorial view of the Father’s power, denouncing him as “Our great forbidder, safe with all his spies / About him” (PL 9.815–16). 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM25 David Mikics26 But if we recognize that incarnate authority does not exist, this knowl- edge may open onto a new freedom, even if it at first seems a desolate, unhappy one, like that of Adam and Eve wandering out of Eden at the end of Paradise Lost. Critics of Paradise Lost are inclined to find the cause of the fall in ei- ther Adam or Eve (or, more rarely, both). But we might do better to find it in our desire for a God who would incarnate the law perfectly. Order has a flaw or hole in it, corresponding to its lack of fit with the actors who occupy its positions. This flaw prevents incarnate authority from ever taking place, by pointing out what we might think of as both an excessive element and a lack: an element of the scene that cannot be made sense of, or justified. Something (in Paradise Lost, the forbidden fruit) must be left out of any structure of authority exactly because authority is not just a structure, because it must be performed by somebody and centered around some thing, some actual object. In Paradise Lost God the Father establishes his mysterious power by creating beings whose raison d’être is to please him: that is, who want to understand his desire as the basis of their own. Yet the addition of that puzzling object, the fruit in the garden, appears to make such under- standing impossible. Why would God want to do something that seems to ruin Eden’s coherence, creating death in the midst of life? The fruit points to the lack in God’s order, the fault in the otherwise perfect paradisal system. On a level we may find hard to conceive, though, Milton solves the problem: the forbidden fruit makes coherence possible, even though its presence appears to expose a corrupt spot in the universe. It is “that only tree / Of knowledge, planted by the tree of life, / So near grows death to life, what e’er death is,” as Adam speculates in book 4 (4.423–25). The fruit seems to have some strange intrinsic potency, as if it were alien to the creation, and a threat to that creation’s goodness, yet somehow necessary to it. Kerrigan remarks that “its effects would not appear to be those of just any fruit, and Milton himself allows that it might have been the tasti- est one” (Kerrigan, 255). We can feel the fruit’s consequence in our fallen bodies, Milton argues (as Kerrigan shows). Milton’s creativity takes the form of trying the reader by confronting him with the possibility of—with our feeling of—a tainted creation, and therefore an imperfect God. Such possibility is a cruelty of our fate, our human circumstances, that far ex- ceeds the comic-strip wickedness of Empson’s bad Father, with his adolescent taste for torturing his creatures. We must remember the central role of trial in Milton. Paradise Lost tests God, as well as Adam and Eve and the reader. It turns the tables on authority, perhaps most of all in the exaltation (the begetting) of the Son recounted in book 5, when God appears to dare Satan to rebel, and the 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM26 29Miltonic Marriage to be an inevitable form of Milton’s, and our, ideology. Miltonic authority, like the Father’s authority, and like my authority as a teacher of Milton, rests on this command: submit yourself to this seemingly archaic law /doctrine / body of knowledge, but don’t actually submit all the way. Not submitting fully enables you to discern and identify with a forgiven creature of excep- tional status, Milton’s Eve, since part of you necessarily slips outside the control of the law. So our enjoyment of the poem becomes stolen pleasure, a cheating of authority. More generally, in any literature classroom we urge students to learn accurately and obediently, but we also tend to order them to have fun, and to express themselves. (Fish’s formula, by contrast, is that you reap the benefits of interpretive forgiveness only if you submit com- pletely, learning the proper punishment for stolen pleasure.) Liberal criticism culminates by taking the “progressive” elements of a text, as in the republican Milton praised by critics like John Rogers and Annabel Patterson, and diminishing the significance of Milton’s authoritarianism (Patterson, Liberalism, 62–99).6 Rogers implicitly laments the fact that in Paradise Lost Milton remained attached to the primitive power of the Father, instead of allowing humans to become complete “authors to themselves,” in the Father ’s famous phrase (3.122) (Rogers, 176). Rogers thus wishes for a Milton who would be fully congenial to our contemporary sensibilities: a Milton for whom what Lacan calls the big Other, the symbolic authority that stands behind our ideas of the just and the reasonable, would be as attenuated as it is for us. What in Milton re- mains bound to the archaic power of the father is, in this whig-historical reading, rendered uninteresting, a mere obstruction to the pleasure we might take in seeing ourselves in Paradise Lost’s nascent, as yet not fully articulated commitments to freedom, individual responsibility, and con- science. In a similar way, McColley’s portrait of Eve becomes a mirror for our feminist, liberal sensibilities; whatever else there is in Milton is ex- pendable. The liberals have made significant historical discoveries; they have clarified Milton’s relation to a powerful later tradition, one that we still inhabit. But this clarification has also been a kind of censorship. In the readings of the liberal critics, the blandness of the ego ideal tends to domi- nate. The way we would like to be seen by authority in order to secure our own lovability guides their reading of Milton’s poem. Such lovable liberalism does not exist in Fish, that authoritarian par excellence. In fact, Fish, in what might be seen as either a revenge on or a perverse salute to Empson’s reading, seems to exult in making Milton, and Milton’s God, as unlovable as possible. Fish’s great virtue is his advo- cacy of a Milton who is supremely upsetting to the comfort of the ego ideal, one who attacks as a bad eminence our fallen complacency, and our wish for approval. The revolutionary significance of Fish’s Surprised by Sin (1967; 2nd ed., 1997) lay in the way Fish resisted readers’ inclination to 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM29 David Mikics30 divide Paradise Lost’s pleasures from its stern lesson. Fish saw key signs of the poem’s doctrinal urges in the way we readers get involved in, and enthralled by, the wayward drama of Satan’s ruin and Eve’s seeking. Satanic charisma and Edenic delight were now proven to be no distrac- tion, but rather firmly functional in the poem’s didactic project: traps laid for the unwary reader, designed to humble, or even humiliate, him. Fish backs Empson’s view of Milton’s God as a sadist. It’s just that Fish, unlike Empson, heartily identifies with this disagreeable deity. Kerrigan’s The Sacred Complex (1983) provides a better way than Fish of integrating our experience of Paradise Lost with the poem’s doctrinal urges. Kerrigan definitively shows that Milton’s images of our fallen pleasures are not temptations to be resisted by the faithful reader, as in Fish’s version, but rather the heart of the lesson. Fallen enjoyment is a shadowy presage of something infinitely better. Where we are weak, where we suffer the outcome of our faults, is the very place we also dream of the supernaturally strong, resurrected body that God has prom- ised, and that Milton depicts in his Eden. Only by undergoing our weakness, by cleaving to our wish for the Edenic, can we understand the promise. Kerrigan revealed himself as an authoritarian by subordinating, in the structure of The Sacred Complex, the paradisal image of marriage to another crucial Miltonic fantasy, that of a filial loyalty that could tran- scend Oedipal strife. The Son of Paradise Regained is for Kerrigan, as Abdiel is for Fish, a perfected Adam. Recently, David Quint has champi- oned Kerrigan’s reading as a definitive portrait of Milton’s wish for a successful narcissism, a powerful, contained, incarnated self capable of overcoming time and death (Quint).7 Yet there is another exemplary site of questioning and testing in Milton’s work: not the perfected self but the intimate workings of misrecognition between Adam and Eve, which first reach a decisive height in the separation scene, and which, by the poem’s end, turn into proof of the permanent line of connection between them. After the fall, book 9 of Paradise Lost ends with Adam and Eve locked in mutual recrimi- nation: “Of their vain contest appeared no end” (9.1189). This formless antagonism will yield to the pose glimpsed in their final exit from para- dise, “Hand in hand with wandering steps and slow” (12.648)—and yet they take together not a united, but a “solitary way” (12.649). Under- standing marriage as open to impairment, a bond but also a solitude, rather than the perfecting of the isolated self he will emphasize in Paradise Regained, is Milton’s real focus in Paradise Lost, and his hardest trial. The authoritarians’ faithfulness to Milton has its price. They cannot replicate Milton’s own belief in the Father, even if, like Fish, they identify with Milton’s project so completely that they can teach themselves to 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM30 31Miltonic Marriage discern in his text the evidence of a thing not seen: a justified God. So authoritarians must prove their allegiance to Milton by addressing the temporal distance between Miltonic authority and themselves. After the death of God, how can one stay loyal to him? Only, Fish’s argument sug- gests, by taking the currently empty place of God as if it were full. Truth, for Fish’s Milton, is not just whatever God says is true, but rather the very fact of his saying it, emptied of all content. Fish’s recent preface to the second edition of Surprised by Sin asserts in no uncertain terms that, for Fish’s Milton, “liberty [is . . .] the right kind of bondage” (Fish, lxiv). The right kind of bondage means willing obedience to the word of God, the source of all human freedom. According to Fish, liberals like McColley or Rogers, who look to Milton as the precursor to republican individualism, creator of a poem that proclaims human self-authorization but that unfor- tunately remains marred by the capricious ferocity of an authoritarian God, have utterly failed to grasp the integral relation between authority and freedom in Milton. The Father’s truth, for Fish, must take precedence over Adam and Eve’s, and our, experiential worries or pleasures, over the narrative turns of Paradise Lost that might seem to cast doubt on that truth, over the all-too-human appeal of Eve and the ruined nobility of Satan. All these aspects of the poem, claims Fish, only exist because they are grounded in God’s truth. For Fish, then, the tempting idea of subjecting the Father’s logos to an empirical test turns upside down the basic doc- trine of Paradise Lost. This impulse to test authority is, in Fish’s view, the fallen angels’ fundamental sin, echoed in Eve’s seeking of temptation and in the reader ’s attempt to excuse her and Adam for their choice of experi- ence over obedience. Fallen as we are, we can still make the right choice, Fish insists in the accents of the true believer: [God’s] existence . . . as a presence in [free agents’] daily lives . . . de- pends on their obedience, on an act of belief that does not follow from evidence, but generates it. . . . [T]he truth about the Maker . . . which once in place anchors all subsequent thought, is itself a prod- uct of thought, of conceiving. (Fish, xxxvii) But what kind of thought is it that can deny itself all empirical evidence, all sensible response to the provocative character of God’s actions? For Fish, the more unreasonable one of God’s commands may seem, the more it should be referred to its source rather than to our reason (Fish, 243). But this source is itself concerned with reason, and with the empirical testing that is inseparable from reason. Milton’s God takes great pains to defend, rationalize, or excuse his actions, and in this effort he casts himself as a spectator and judge of events. He wants trial so that he can see the 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM31 David Mikics34 perfectly gracious, yielding conversation between Adam and the Father does not succeed in domesticating her, in removing her strangeness. The scene in book 8 begins with Adam’s recounting of his own birth, which he portrays as an answering motion to God’s impetus of creation. (Their meet conversation is like that of Adam and his divine interlocutor Raphael, who asks Adam for his story, and who reports himself “pleased with thy [i.e., Adam’s] words no less than thou with mine” [8.248].) This coordination or equality, the exact matching of Adam’s desire to that of the Father whom he “adore[s]” (8.280), shows itself definitively in his de- sire for an equal, a helpmeet—a desire that the Father has anticipated in creating Adam, the connoisseur of being. The Father approves Adam’s wish for a partner, saying to him, I, ere thou spakest, Knew it not good for man to be alone, And no such company as then thou saw’st Intended thee, for trial only brought, To see how thou couldst judge of fit and meet: What next I bring shall please thee, be assured, Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire. (8.444–51) Now, with Adam’s request, the Father sees that Adam is exact of taste. In one of his many daring departures from Genesis, Milton, as crit- ics have often pointed out, makes the creation of Eve the outcome of Adam’s desire rather than a simple divine decree. Adam’s dissatisfaction with what God describes as “such company as then thou saw’st” (the in- ferior creatures of the animal kingdom), and his wish for something that matches him, is in fact a “trial,” a test to see whether Adam matches his Father. God genially tells him that he has planned the whole scene “for trial only” (8.447): imparting to Adam a little knowledge of the divine stagecraft, as if such knowledge were an extra reward for having given the right answer. Adam, then, finds himself anticipated by God’s desire for him to desire a “fit help” or “likeness.” Adam proves himself to be the Father’s own likeness, in effect, by wanting for himself what the Father has already wanted for him. But the mirroring that Adam fulfills with God, answering perfectly the desire of the Father by proving it to be his own as well, will not be sustained in his relation to Eve. Her desirability in Adam’s eyes actually lies in her difference from, as well as her “fit” resemblance to him. Eve, who was grown from his missing part, extracted from him and yet permanently outside him, remains for Adam the mysterious partner: fundamentally other than Adam, and yet essential to any completeness, any true fulfillment he could 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM34 35Miltonic Marriage imagine. No wonder that Adam, confiding his doubts to Raphael in book 8, inventively speculates that God took from him “perhaps / More than enough” when he made Eve from that extra rib (8.536–37). During his long talk with Raphael in book 8, Adam has just con- cluded the memory of his own creation and his request for a helpmeet when he introduces his actual experience of Eve as an exception to the creation, at once a lack and a superfluity, something “perhaps / More than enough.” She seems to him an oddness distinct from everything else in Eden. Adam says he knows Eve to be “inferior, in the mind / And in- ward faculties,” and “less expressing” than he himself does “the character of that dominion given” by God over nature. In the hierarchical terms by which God has ordered the universe, she falls short. But as Adam’s “other self,” the image of a being who exceeds God’s terms, she works all too well. Eve shows her difference from the fitness and adherence that Adam has shown toward God’s will, his discerning of the Father’s desire, when she transports him from himself. Such transport contrasts to his move- ment at his creation, when Adam’s self-motivated athlete’s energy animated, with punchy resilience, his being, a mechanism tightly wound and then triggered by God (“By quick instinctive motion up I sprung, / . . . and upright / Stood on my feet” [8.259–61]). For Adam, Eve’s presence suggests that something is lacking in him (instead of proposing to fill a lack, as in Adam’s request to God for a mate). Faced with her, he confesses to Raphael, Transported I behold, Transported touch; here passion first I felt, Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else Superior and unmoved, here only weak Against the charm of beauty’s powerful glance. Or nature failed in me, and left some part Not proof enough such object to sustain, Or from my side subducting, took perhaps More than enough . . . (8.529–37) The delicate matching of passivity and activity in “Transported I behold, / Transported touch” yields, as Adam goes on, to a strange sort of “commotion.” This commotion should ideally be a con-motion, the sym- metrical movement-together of being touched or perceived by Eve and touching or perceiving her, a coincidence or mirroring not available in the relation between Adam and the rest of creation. Instead, it suggests an alarmed susceptibility on Adam’s part. Suddenly, he sees himself as a wounded victim. The extraction of part of Adam gets turned around into his vulnerability before the magic “glance” of the other: glancing being a 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM35 David Mikics36 superb way of summing up his sense of the oblique, half-hidden, yet decisive casualness that Eve’s presence displays in cornering him. (Here Milton remembers, and renders dangerous, the ladies whose “bright eyes / rain influence” during their judging of the chivalric contest in L’Allegro [121–22].) I began this discussion by referring to a previous, comparable mo- ment of apprehension, Adam’s morning-after reaction to Eve’s dream in book 5. There, Adam explains away the dream’s exhilarating, terrifying effect as the misfiring within an ungainly linkage of psychic agencies: “Oft in [reason’s] absence mimic fancy wakes / To imitate her; but misjoining shapes, / Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams” (5.110–12). Similarly, Adam in book 8 falls back on an idea of the workings of nature, but simultaneously renders nature unreliable by picturing it as a (here, surgical) operation, one liable, in rather clunkily literal fashion, to fail. Maybe nature failed to install a properly effective Eve-guard; or maybe—and here Adam comes closer—her presence to him, which is also her absence from him (the loss of the rib), is a case of nature taking “more than enough.” Her attractiveness, her superiority, is his feeling at a loss, in contrast to the precision or “exact” enough-ness with which Adam an- swers God’s desire earlier in book 8. In the birth of Eve from him, then, Adam has received the gift of an enabling lack, the sense of something missing. Eve formulates for him a pleasure inestimably different from, and better than all others. Exactly for this reason she must remain inaccessible, unlike the previous, “lower” pleasures of the Edenic environment. Eve, in spite of all her wondrously palpable presence to Adam, also remains the thing that the Father has, quite literally, taken from him. She teases Adam with an elusiveness that, after all, makes up her real value. Raphael, combatting this effect, tries to reintroduce Eve into the hierarchy of creation, to make her make sense, make her accessible: 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: weigh her with thy self; Then value: oft times nothing profits more Than self esteem, grounded on just and right Well managed; of that skill the more thou know’st, The more she will acknowledge thee her head, And to realities yield all her shows: Made so adorn for thy delight the more, So awful, that with honour thou mayst love Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise. (8.561–78) 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM36 39Miltonic Marriage I from the influence of thy looks receive Access in every virtue, in thy sight More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on, Shame to be overcome or over-reached Would utmost vigor raise, and raised unite. Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel When I am present, and thy trial choose With me, best witness of thy virtue tried. (9.309–17) This passage is often ignored by critics who want to see Milton’s Adam as resisting the impulse to seek out trial, to prove virtue visibly. Adam does give, here, a nervous turn of phrase, “if need were / Of outward strength,” implying his uncertain thought that some other sort of contest, one not so apparent, might be the truly decisive one. But he, clearly, does not know how to imagine such an inward test. Like Plato in the Sympo- sium suggesting that an army of lovers will be victorious because of their desire to perform heroically in their beloveds’ eyes (178e–179a),9 Adam stages a visible trial and positions himself as witness. This action re- sembles the exaltation of the Son by the Father recounted in book 5. Adam’s phrase “and raised unite” implies a need for him and Eve to be made more united than they are—just as, in book 5, the Father announces the elevation or begetting of his Son as a means to a closer and more articulated union among the angels. But the unexpected promotion of the Son in book 5 interrupts the intuitive solidarity that the insomniac Satan claims as he awakens Beelzebub, his “companion dear” and bedmate, during the night that follows (“both waking we were one” [5.678]). The test on the earthlings during the separation scene in book 9 similarly chal- lenges them to formulate an expression of union that can encompass a newly visible distance and difference. In contrast to the begetting of the Son and the rebellion that results from it, the distance between Adam and Eve that keeps opening in the sepa- ration scene of book 9 is specifically human, of a kind that does not occur among the angels. From the moment that Satan nudges Beelzebub into “new counsels” (5.681), the angels seem more politicized than the earthlings, dif- ferent from one another not in their being but in their attitudes or inclinations (consider the distance between the macho soldier Moloch and the, in Empson’s phrase, “sober lawyer” Belial [Empson 52]). If Adam now stands for obedient theorizing (based on the hierarchical division between God and man taught him by Raphael) and Eve for experimental practice (derived from the immanent experience of Eden that dictates to her the wisdom of them working apart), then this division challenges the very possibility of negotiation. The angels may be split from time to time by temperamental 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM39 David Mikics40 differences, but in humans temperament is confused with, or melded to, the fact of gender difference, a barrier that does not afflict the angels. The soli- darity of the fallen human pair will not be political, not a way of moving a losing situation toward hope, but private and eternal. “Within himself / The danger lies,” as Adam sums up the situation at this crucial juncture, “yet lies within his power / . . . God left free the will,” . . . for what obeys Reason, is free, and reason he made right, But bid her well beware, and still erect, Lest by some fair appearing good surprised She dictate false, and misinform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoins, That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me. Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve, Since reason not impossibly may meet Some specious object by the foe suborned And fall into deception . . . (9.351–62) Adam here relies on the awkward connection of faculties derived from Aristotle’s De Anima 3.4–15 and Pietro Pomponazzi’s important Renais- sance response to Aristotle, his treatise On the Immortality of the Soul. Pomponazzi, following De Anima 3.7 (431a), reiterates Aristotle’s state- ment that we cannot have any knowledge at all without a phantasm, an image constructed by the mind, but that the human intellect also “needs the body as object.” Since the mind “is joined to sense, it cannot be re- leased entirely from matter and quantity.” The senses’ reliance on the material world leads to their liability to be deceived by what Adam calls a “specious object” (Pomponazzi, 319; see also De Anima, 3.3 [428b–429a]). Adam, in following this Aristotelian view, evades the importance of the phantasm that is his object of desire by translating what troubles him into a question concerning the mere accuracy of sensory perception. But cor- rectly judging everyday objects’ “matter and quantity” is not the issue here. The phantasm remains far less accessible than Adam’s terms admit: it is Adam’s picture of that thing in Eve that he depends on, and even founds himself on. The “swerve” therefore cannot be corrected in the way that Adam wishfully claims it can, by comparison of his own and Eve’s perceptions as they protect each other from lying illusion (“Not then mis- trust, but tender love enjoins, / That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me”). In Adam’s version the will obeys reason, but reason may be deceived, “by some fair appearing good surprised,” and therefore reason is enjoined 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM40 41Miltonic Marriage to remain vigilant, “still erect.” (The image of reason as an erection en garde uncannily mirrors the tempter’s surprising appearance later in book 9, “tower[ing] / Fold above fold a surging maze,” a fabulous operatic slinky-toy [9.498–99], and Eve will indeed reason with this apparition.) Reason takes the place of will here, willing itself to defend against its vul- nerability to false impressions. For Adam in this desperate speech, the couple’s “mind”ing each other will, he hopes, make up for the faultiness of individual mind, its susceptibility to sensory deception. In his final words to Eve before they part, however, he admits the impossibility of the constant mutual mind- fulness that would enable each to keep the other in check, on guard against evil. Adam has just been pleading with Eve to “seek not tempta- tion then” (is her impulse to work apart such a seeking? Did it become one in the course of this conversation?). But now he abandons the goal of avoiding temptation, admitting in effect that such avoidance is impos- sible: “trial will come unsought” (9.364–66). Wouldst thou approve thy constancy, approve First thy obedience; the other who can know, Not seeing thee attempted, who attest? But if thou think, trial unsought may find Us both securer than thus warn’d thou seem’st, Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more, Go in thy native innocence, rely On what thou hast of virtue, summon all, For God towards thee hath done his part, do thine. (9.367–75) Adam suddenly finds himself encircled by irony. Telling Eve to prove her “obedience” rather than her “constancy,” he orders her to “go,” a com- mand that she does in fact obey.10 The problem with Eve’s constancy is that it has not been proven; Adam’s sentence leads as if inevitably to the wish to prove it, to see it proven. And it can only be proven, that is, “attest[ed],” by being tempted, or tested. Adam has resisted this logic ear- lier, but in this speech he yields to it, conceding that “trial unsought” and unexpected meets a more vulnerable or “securer” self (i.e., one without the protection of care, cura). “Thus warned,” Eve now “seem[s]” well- armored by care. Adam, then, reluctantly endorses Eve’s “seem[ing],” the semblance with which her virtuous guardedness shows itself, in order to save himself from the pain of mere appearance were she to stand by him in a literal or bodily sense, while wandering elsewhere in spirit. What Adam suffers from here is, most apparently, the spectre of an Eve who would be unfree, whose body would be present to him, but her mind denied: 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM41 David Mikics44 critical practice is supplied in another Guillory essay, titled “From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary” (72). According to Guillory, the char- acters of Paradise Lost are not characters at all, but bearers of historical allegory, devoid of personal motives and desires. Even if we could read Milton, or any other author, in this manner, rigorously expelling every hint of readerly identification and sympathy (clearly, we could not), why would we want to—except to demonstrate an absolute dominion over texts that would allow us literary critics to turn them into emblems of a grand historical narrative whose meaning we have already decided? Like Guillory, Mary Nyquist uses the reflecting pool scene in book 4 to argue for the “construction of a novel female subjectivity” that “testif[ies] to the progressive privatization and sentimentalization of the domestic sphere” (187).13 Despite all the subtle and forceful turns of their readings, both Guillory and Nyquist type Eve in the banal terms of his- toricist cliché. For Nyquist, Eve is already the tedious emblem of the “domestic sphere,” the good bourgeois housewife praised by so many of the women readers that Wittreich cites in Feminist Milton. This reading of Eve, dictated by a history of social oppression that resists with all its might exactly the kind of thought that Milton enjoins on us, is all too su- perficial, as is demonstrated by the stereotyped terms of the contrast. What is most historically consequential turns out to be, in this case, also what is most dubious to our current enlightened thinking. In Nyquist’s reading the sentimentalization of the feminine is a mere product of history, an ideological artifact that we know all too well. But Milton’s pic- ture of marriage as an inevitability and a mystery claims the impossibility of knowing one’s partner, of seeing her fully or clearly. (I say her, rather than him, because in Milton it is men who try, unsuccessfully, to know and possess women, not because women in general have a greater claim to mysteriousness; the Gothic novel will turn the tables by making the man, rather than the woman, the shadowy, forbidden figure.) By empha- sizing the inadequate answers that social life offers in its attempt to cover up this impossibility, Nyquist and Guillory assist in covering it up. History becomes an alibi, a way of avoiding real trial. Of course, a psychoanalytic vocabulary, such as I have been (mostly implicitly) relying on, also risks such avoidance if it becomes a mere method of decoding Milton, making the testing of the reader an easier assignment. In insisting on the continued obscurity of Eve’s desire in the separation and temptation scenes of book 9, I hope to have overcome the danger of such reductiveness. Eve’s other enjoyment at the Fall—though it may offer hints of stubborn curiosity, will to power, intellectual ambition, will to indulgence, all-too-human weakness—cannot, finally, be defined. “Nor was godhead from her thought,” Milton reminds us as Eve consumes her fate (9.790): but what does godhead, the human face divine, mean to Eve? 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM44 45Miltonic Marriage Something less vulgar, presumably, than the prolonged adoration by an- gelic groupies that Satan has offered to her (9.547–48); but also something less ordinary, more darkly covert, than the adroit management skills that the Eve critics admire in her. If Eve in Paradise Lost is really only the fore- runner of an intellectual cliché, the stature that Guillory and Nyquist reduce her to, her attraction, for Adam as for us, would remain truly unaccount- able. Instead, there seems to be something in her, something in Milton’s poem, that “sees when [we] are seen least wise,” not just escaping from our interpretive grasp, but criticizing the very act of grasping, and the motives for it. Putting us to the test in this manner is what Milton’s poem is for. We can only try to be equal to its demands.14 University of Houston Houston, Texas NOTES 1. Critics like Michael Lieb in his Poetics of the Holy and Joseph Wittreich in his Visionary Poetics, whose aim is to recover the full visionary glory of Milton’s poem, stand outside of the dichotomy I outline in this essay because they suggest, in Blakean fashion, that to dwell on this choice is to diminish our experience as readers. See especially Lieb’s preface to his Poetics of the Holy, xviii–xix, with its critique of Radzinowicz’s Toward Samson Agonistes. 2. According to Frye, Iliad critics value the reality principle in all its harshness, and therefore prize tragedy, realism, and irony, whereas Odyssey critics, delight- ing in artificiality, prefer the stylized conventions of comedy, romance—and “read[ing] detective stories in bed” (Frye, Natural Perspective, 2). 3. In addition to McColley’s Milton’s Eve and Rumrich’s Milton Unbound, I have in mind Davies’s The Feminine Reclaimed, as well as two articles by Lewalski and Webber in Milton Studies: Lewalski’s “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” and Webber’s “The Politics of Poetry.” For a useful account of this interpretive tradition, see Janet Halley’s essay “Feminine Autonomy in Milton’s Sexual Poet- ics” in Julia Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman. 4. Yet it is also true that the Father can change the rules of the game by sacrific- ing his Son. Danielson too must bear witness to the Miltonic desire to imagine a deity who, at least in one of his aspects, would be able to redeem the world, mak- ing it perfect again. This Miltonic redeemer is, as A. D. Nuttall argues, not the Son but the Father: the reader’s inescapable impression in Paradise Lost is that the Father himself “wills the dynamic conclusion” of salvation (Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 165). Nuttall’s fascinating argument that Milton is in one part of his mind a Promethean Gnostic, who produces by the end of his poem a liberating God in place of a tyrannical one, shows an innovative way of explaining the interest of Paradise Lost. In place of a more traditional effort like Danielson’s to make the theodicy of the poem coherent and convincing, Nuttall argues for a transforma- tive dissonance in Milton, suggesting that Milton’s thinking exceeds and violates the plans for his poem that he established in thought. 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM45 David Mikics46 5. The scene in the film The Devil’s Advocate in which a contemporary corpo- rate Satan, played by Al Pacino (and named John Milton!), visits the famous tic-tac-toe playing chicken at the Double Hey Rice Shop in New York’s Chinatown furnishes an apt commentary on Empson’s notion of God as a gam- bler who has stacked the deck against his creatures (thereby producing a universe whose machinations are akin to those of the chicken that has been trained to master tic-tac-toe). Pacino’s devil claims to admire the perfection of the game that has damned him, describing himself at one point as “God’s biggest fan.” 6. In addition to Patterson’s Early Modern Liberalism, see her introduction to her selection of Milton criticism. Patterson here writes that the second half of Paradise Lost “recounts a process that we might call the raising in both Adam and Eve of political consciousness,” namely, the rejection of “patriarchalism” (Patterson, John Milton, 17). Similarly, Catherine Belsey suggests that “Paradise Lost points to a way of enhancing human sovereignty, by substituting for the poli- tics of truth, anchored in metaphysics, a politics of interest, which is also necessarily, since interests are always plural, a politics of difference” (Patterson, John Milton, 84). See also Kerrigan’s remarks on Christopher Kendrick’s Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form, in Kerrigan’s review essay on seventeenth-century studies in the 1980s (75). Kerrigan points out that Kendrick looks forward to the replacement of Milton’s narrative of prohibition by a liberal narrative of permis- sion—and adds that a narrative of permission may be less interesting or telling, even for our contemporary liberal culture, than a narrative of prohibition. 7. For the theme of narcissism, see also John Guillory’s essay “Milton, Narcis- sism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem,” in Christopher Kendrick, ed., Critical Essays, as well as John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World. 8. In his first divorce tract the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton raises, only to exclude as irrelevant to the kind of marital strife under discussion, the possibility of an equal balance of power between husband and wife based on “parity of wisdome.” He laments, “What an injury is it after wedlock not to be belov’d, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any pairty of wisdome, for that were something rea- sonable, but out of female pride” (italics mine; Milton, Complete Prose Works, 2:324). 9. Plato’s speaker Phaedrus alludes to the “Sacred Band” of Thebes, the army founded by Gorgides ca. 378 B.C.E. 10. For a differing interpretation of this passage, see Philip Gallagher, Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny, 73. 11. Guillory points out that Freud (in “On Narcissism”) defines narcissism by describing a woman conscious of her beauty (200–201). 12. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse risk a similar reductiveness in their sophisticated reading of Paradise Lost as an allegory of the historical shift from an aristocratic economy of conspicuous consumption (before the fall) to an economy of work (after the fall). The result of such readings tends to be the crude translation of an intriguing character—Eve—to the terms of social cliché: “As the fruit fills [Eve’s] body with a common, garden variety of desire, she ceases to embody aristocratic value and becomes the unruly woman, leveler of hierar- chies” (Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Imaginary Puritan, 105). 02 Mikics 1/23/04, 10:54 AM46