Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost | ENGS 320, Papers of English Language

Download Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost | ENGS 320 and more Papers English Language in PDF only on Docsity! Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost Regina Schwartz Representations, No. 34. (Spring, 1991), pp. 85-103. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-6018%28199121%290%3A34%3C85%3ARVAPTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O Representations is currently published by University of California Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucal.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 11 19:30:31 2007 R E G I N A S C H W A R T Z Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows ifyou'ue been bad or good So be good for goodness sake. Read zn such a way that the znvzszble becomes uzszble; the transcendent, hzstorzcal, the sacred zcon, a cultural zmage Mzlton's poem becomes as powerful a n znstrument for the undozng of the cultural economy znscrzbed zn zt as zt wasfor zts znstztutzon-more powerful, zndeed, than less '@re" forms of patnarchal currency -Christine Froulal THROUGHOUTO U R R E A D I N G O F Paradise Lost, we are directed to follow someone else's line of sight: through the eye of Satan, we "behold I Far off th' Empyreal Heav'n" and we first see "this pendant world"; joining Satan's gaze, we first view Paradise, eyeing Adam and Eve askance with hislour jealous leer. When the Almighty Father "ben[ds] down his eye, I His own works and their works at once to view," we bend down our eye with his, and it happens again when helwe behold our two first parents, survey Hell and Chaos, and watch Satan in the "precincts of Light," ready "to stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet1 On the bare outside of this World" (3.73-74). Early in the poem, then, Satan is looking at Heaven and Earth as God is looking at Satan-who is looking at Heaven and Earth-and we are implicated in all of these gazes. It is more com- plicated still, for while the narrator is blind, he also sees, and we join the drama of an unseeing narrator who nonetheless tells all he sees. Paradise Lost is a poem in which everyone seems to be looking at everyone else-Satan, God, Eve, Adam, the narrator, us-and all the while, everyone is looking back. Even the Fall itself, which biblically speaking should be the story of the temp- tation to taste (or touch, as Eve exaggerates the command), lays surprising stress on the temptation to see. In the rhetoric of synaesthesia that marks the scenes of temptation and fall, seeing continually emerges as the key sense; indeed, Milton comes close to telling us that this is sin enough, to rewriting the Genesis tradition to make the sin looking rather than eating: "Fixt on the Fruit she gaz'd, which to behold 1Might tempt alone" (9.735-36). In the temptation scene, the serpent tries REPRESENTATIONS34 Spring 1991 0REGINA S C ~ W A R T Z 85 Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, O r in Valdarno to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. (1.283-91) To summarize this logic, the complete movement of our gaze in the passage is from looking at Satan to looking at Galileo to looking at the object of Galileo's sight. But that isn't quite right either, for the simile complicates things further. As our eye follows Satan moving toward the shore with his shield, our line of sight is analogous to Galileo's line of sight as he looks at the moon, and the force of that analogy is to establish, not sequence, but simultaneity: even as Galileo is watching the moon, we are watching Satan, specifically his shield, which is "like the moon." That means both that we are made a spectator of Galileo (he is our exhibit) and that we are made to identify with Galileo (we are the same voyeur he is, gazing at the heavens), and when we take the logic of the simile to heart, we are not only shifting back and forth between these positions, we are in both positions at once: we look at Galileo and as Galileo, and that is one of the eerie senses in which the object of our sight looks back at us. In several important ways, a conventional pseudo-Freudian understanding of voyeurism is challenged in this passage. First, the successful voyeur supposedly watches unseen, but Galileo is not hidden from view, for someone else-God, the narrator, and the reader-is always watching him watch. Second, voyeurism sug- gests positioning a subject and an object, but our example demonstrates how unstable any such positioning necessarily is when the "subject" is both looking at the "object" of sight and identifying with it. Which orb is spotty after all? Of course, this shifting is accounted for in Lacan's elaboration of the Freudian mech- anism of reversal. In "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud describes how the voyeur and exhibitionist change roles in response to fear of object loss: fearing he will lose his object of sight, the voyeur inevitably wants to be the object himself. Lacan's contribution is to see this shifting as continual, to see the positions as so unstable that they cannot really be fixed positions at alL4 Any fixed positioning as voyeur or exhibitionist is also challenged on another front: according to Edward Branigan, the first stage in a cinematic point-of-view shot must be to situate the spectator at point A before situating the object at point B, in order to establish the line of sight from point A to point B.5 But we do not know where Galileo is; is he looking from the top of Fiesole or from the valley of the Arno? We do know that his gaze sparks projections: from a mountain or in a river valley, Galileo sees (of all things) mountains or rivers, in the moon. But wait, are those spots moun- tains, or are they rivers?-it turns out that the object is as unstable as the subject. Yet somehow Galileo is granted a line of sight, even though we do not know where he is or what he sees and where it is. The case of Galileo also suggests that the voyeur cannot successfully possess the object of his sight because what he sees is at best a fabrication, an idealized image composed at an ideal point in a telescope, another fabrication. When Milton alludes to the astronomer as the "Tuscan artistH-the only use of artist in all his poetry-he chooses a word whose multivalence casts long shadows in this poem. In the Renaissance, art& could mean both a master of the liberal arts, a philosopher, and someone who has practical rather than theoretical "arts"; by the time Charles was executed, artist suggested an untrustworthy master of artiface. Galileo is not just the artifacer of his optic instrument; there is, as Donald Friedman points out, more than a hint that he has fabricated those moons pot^.^ In contrast to the trustworthy vision of Raphael, "the GlassIOf Galileo, less assur'd, observes I Imagin'd Lands and Regions in the Moon" (5.261-63). That wonderful line joins things observed to things imagined unproblematically; Milton seems to suggest-and Lacan would agree-that for the astronomer, and the voyeur, to observe is to imagine. Starlight Paradise Lost is brimming with lustful eyes. For all of the ways that Galileo challenges the cliches of voyeurism-as-aggression and exhibitionism-as- passivity, there is plenty of evidence for such formulas elsewhere. Satan as voyeur1 aggressor and Eve as exhibitlvictim virtually allegorize those notions. Satan approaches Paradise as a predator, "nearer to view his prey, unespi'd." His eyes become weapons, metonymically, the paws that would tear Adam and Eve to P'ieces. about them round A Lion now he stalks with fiery glare, Then as a Tiger, who by chance hath spi'd In some Purlieu two gentle Fawns at play, Straight couches close, then rising changes oft His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground Whence rushing he might surest seize them both Gript in each paw. (4.402-8) Next, Satan resolves, "with narrow search I must walk round I This Garden, and no corner leave unspi'd" (4.528-29). Making those rounds with "sly circumspec- tion" (the sly voyeur would himself be hidden), he intends to master all he surveys. That mastering, destructive aim of his gaze is perhaps clearest when Satan watches Paradise from a special position of concealment: perched as a cormorant Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy 89 on the Tree of Life, he "only us'dIFor prospect, what well us'd had been the pledgk I Of immortality." Why should immortality be the antithesis ofprospect? Why, unless Satan's line of sight is the antithesis of life, unless, that is, the gaze of Satan is lethal. His sightings-Satan will inhabit more predatory creatures to spy "unes- pi'dn-are offered less as the prelude to attacking his prey than as the first phase of his attack. Freud joined his discussions of voyeurism and exhibitionism to another pair, sadism and masochism. Like sadism, the look is an effort to master, to possess, as the devils intend to "possess I All as [their] own" (2.365-66), but the mechanism of reversal that turns the sadist into masochist also turns the voyeur's gaze toward its object back upon h i m ~ e l f . ~ While he goes on to insist that the active stage is primary (first we look, then we want to be seen), Freud argues elsewhere for the primacy of narcissism: we begzn by directing our gaze at ourselves, and only then do we direct it outward-like Eve, looking first at herself in the pool, and only later at Adam.8 In her temptation dream, Satan begins by tempting Eve to want to be the object of more gazes (playing, we could speculate, on the fact that she began life as the object of her own gaze, making the object position a familiar one for her).g The sexual overtones of gazing upon her, and thereby devouring her, are not very subtle. Heav'n wakes with all his eyes, Whom to behold but thee, Nature's desire, In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze. (5.44-47) But as the dream proceeds, instead of being looked at, Eve does the looking, gazing first at the tree and then at the one standing beside the tree who "on that Tree also gazed" (5.54-57). The very process of temptation describes the reversal Freud characterizes, from Eve as seen object to Eve becoming the voyeur herself. "Taste this," says Satan, "and be henceforth among the Gods Thyself a Goddess . . . and seeIWhat life the Gods live there, and such live thou" (5.76-81). Eve tastes and Eve sees: transported up to the clouds, she sees below "a prospect wide and various." If Satan began by luring Eve into the familiar narcissistic desire to be an exhibit, he concludes by holding out to her a very different temptation: the temptation of voyeurism. Eve wants to seize the spectatorial position, to gaze upon that prospect wide and various, and by that gaze to master all she surveys. Her punishment is the inevitable terror for being caught in the act of looking. In this sense, the myth of the Fall in Paradise Lost is made to enact the patriarchal dread of woman seizing her own gaze: she must be condemned to death for her desire. All of this is classic-too classic-and the same dynamic is fully elaborated in the temptation itself, the waking one. The serpent spies Eve, the hand of Eve- What about Satan's predatory gaze? Couldn't the gaze of Satan be a powerful patriarchal symbol, and as such a confirmation of the poem's ideology of patriarchal domination? In Paradise Lost, the polarization of voyeurlvictimizerl man over against exhibitlvictimlwoman is attached most persistently, as we have seen, to Satan, to the temptation of Eve, and to the Fall. Satan does not only prey upon Eve; his impulse to polarize power is born when he regards the Son's ele- vation as his own reduction-Satan's is an entire discourse of victims and victim- izers-and the Fall is a fall into that classic (and Satanic) take on voyeurism in which lookinglinquiry is destructive. The distinction between prelapsarian and postlapsarian looking is made graphic in the scene where Eve "minister'd naked" at the luncheon on the grass of Adam and Raphael. The fallen narrator knows all about predatory gazes and projects back onto the occasion the perspective that would turn Eve into a topless and bottomless waitress. And then, the Miltonic "but" shakes off the voyeuristic fantasy, protesting that "then" is not now, even as the protest heightens his delight, veiling his object of desire with that vast distance imposed by the Fall. Meanwhile at Table Eve Minister'd naked, and thir flowing cups With pleasant liquors crown'd: O innocence Deserving Paradise! if ever, then, Then had the Sons of God excuse to have been Enamour'd at that sight; but in those hearts Love unlibidinous reign'd, norjealousy Was understood, the injur'd Lover's Hell. (5.443-50) Perhaps voyeruism is so thoroughly implicated in the Fall because Milton under- stands the temptation as the temptation of voyeurism-that is, the temptation to polarize power. In this sense Milton gives predatory voyeurism that fatal role, not to punish women for their desire for it, but in order to critique it altogether. The aggressive gaze is not only Eve's, nor is it only fatal for Eve; it is the cause of all our "death and all our woe." Eve's error may not be seizing the gaze but inter- preting it (like so many film critics) as polarizing power into victims and victim- izers. At the moment of her fall, Eve interprets divine looking in just that way: And I perhaps am secret; Heav'n is high, High and remote to see from thence distinct Each thing on Earth; and other care perhaps May have diverted from continual watch Our great Forbidder, safe with all his Spies. (9.811-15) Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy 93 A newly fallen Eve must hide since her Forbidder has all the weapons. Like Satan, she kels continually watched in a perpetual prison, and her only hope of freedom lies in the Forbidder diverting his gaze or having his vision clouded for reasons that have nothing to do with her. Still, classifying the scenes of sadistic looking as "fallen" or, in contemporary parlance, "perversions," begs the question of whether seeing is sadistic, positing, as it does, that there is a bad kind of seeing in the fallen world and a good kind of seeing once-upon-a-time. It turns out that even these fallen voyeuristic scenes are not so straightforward, for the aggression of the voyeur is challenged on other fronts, familiar from the example of Galileo. Someone is watching Satan watch Eve, someone is watching Eve watch Satan, someone is watching Adam watch Eve, and someone is watching Eve watch Adam. The reason that, theoretically, the voyeur's pleasure depends upon his hiding, upon his seeing without being seen, is that the very character of his aggression is to turn the object of his sight into just that, an object; if he were simultaneously seen, then he too would be reduced to an object, of another's gaze. But all of the voyeurs in Paradise Lost suffer pre- cisely this dilemma-God is watching his creatures, the narrator is watching God and his creatures, and the reader is watching them all-and that is another reason why the temptation of voyeurism, the temptation to master, is never wholly achieved. Someone else is always watching. But if sadism is constrained by another's sadism-by someone else watching the voyeur watch-then aggression is not denied; it is only deferred. Wouldn't the last one in this chain of sight be the master? Depending upon our framework, this "fourth look"-as Paul Willemen calls it to distinguish the watcher watching the watcher from the other three looks in cinemalg-this gaze can belong to God, to the narrator, or to the reader. As we have seen, within the story told by the epic narrator, God is the Transcendental Voyeur, ever watchful of the watchers watching, so that for all of his efforts at concealment, Satan is fully exposed-to the all-seeing eye of Heaven. And Eve's reflexive guilty response to her crime- her hope that she has not been seen, that "other care . . .may have diverted from continual watch / Our great Forbidder"-is not simply projection; in a parody of the earlier exhibitionist wish to be seen a goddess among the gods, Eve is seen by God, "for what can scape the eye of God all-seeing?" Adam's shame is expressed, as we know, by the urge to hide, to avoid the gaze of another; he calls upon pines to cover him, leaves to cover him, until the robe of righteousness is offered by the Son of God to cover him-and his private parts-from the sight of his Father. It turns out that God is the supreme voyeur, watching unseen, possessing all he sees, his all-seeing eye circumscribing the power of the other voyeurs. But in the wider context of the epic itself, that position is reserved for the narrator, who even watches God watching, and whose gaze Milton makes an explicit theme. In the larger context still-our experience of the poem-we are in that privileged last position. We watch the narrator watch God watch; theoretically, that makes the reader the arch-voyeur, the tyrant of tyrants of tyrants. Power has so amassed by the time it has been seized by the voyeuristic reader that it is surprising that her mere glance doesn't ignite the epic. Surely, the notion of reading as devouring, of interpreting as mastering, will come as little surprise to most literary critics, and our scrutinizing gazes have so dissected Paradise Lost for several centuries that it is a wonder there is anything left. But there is. And so the image of a reader smug in her awareness that she sees and knows more than either Milton's narrator or his God-attractive as it may be-may need qualifying. Where does this chain of deferred spectatorship really lead? To start with the Almighty Looker, what does God see when he bends down his eye on his work but himself? Milton's theology makes that clear: "God shall be all in all" (3.341), "from whom I All things proceed, and up to him return" (5.469-70). God's first extensive gaze on his world can easily be read as God checking himself out, sur- veying his parts-Earth, Hell, and Chaos-to see what is happening on each of his regions. Now had th'Almighty Father from above, From the pure Empyrean where he sits High throned above all highth, bent down his eye, His own works and their works at once to view. (3.56-59) Or if we prefer to think of the Eternal One temporally instead of spatially, we can catch him peering at himself that way too, "from his prospect high, 1 Wherein past, present, future he beholds" (3.76-77). If God is the Transcendental Voyeur, he is also the Transcendental Exhibit, for while the "invisible king . . . hath sup- pressed in night" his hidden secrets not to be scanned, he has also expressed himself, "shown himself" in creation, where he writes them for all to see in the "book of knowledge fair." Furthermore, while the watching Father is concealed behind skirts "dark with excessive bright" (even the seraphim must veil their eyes), he has expressed the "effulgence of his glory" in his visible Son, "in whose con- spicuous countenance, without cloud / Made visible, th'Almighty Father shines" (3.385-86).20 For that matter, what is the object of the narrator's gaze, if not his work and their works? The narrator even makes it doubtful that he looks outward for this vision: physically blind, he directs his sight inward for this poem.21 And surely the lessons of reader-response criticism prevent us from assuming naively that the reader acts upon an objectltext that is distinct from herself or, for that matter, from her cultural context. But to say that the reader, narrator, and God are only looking at themselves, that the voyeur is only watching herlhimself, is to elide the distinction between subject and object that any notion of aggression depends upon. It is just such a comfortable distinction that Milton prohibits us from making: How can there be a cast of victims and victimizers when it is not possible to determine clearly where God ends and his objects of sight begin, Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy 95 all? Is Eve allowed to look in the same way the others do? Does she have her own gaze) In "Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters,'' Naomi Scheman argues that films that seem to be exceptions to the rule of being governed by the male gaze, films in which women are allowed to look to their heart's content, are singularly marked by "the double state of motherlessness (neither having nor being one)" required of their heroines.31 This blotting out of maternity-or in the case of melodrama, the rupturing of the motherldaughter relation-signals how threat- ening the preoedipal attachment of mother and daughter is to patriarchy and explains its demand that women abandon their mothers to submit to male desire. Eve is motherless, like the comedic heroines who are constructed by male desire, but unlike them, Eve literally comes into existence "only in relation to her father's desire for her," needing to "acknowledge him as her one true parent."32 And because her parent is also her husband, Eve is taught, from birth on, to respond to male desire (hence, she is born sexually mature): she is created by Adam as the object of his desire, and she is recreated by Satan as the object of his desire. But what does Eve want? Milton's scant attention to that question yields the answer to be herself, and he depicts that desire as a fatal narcissism she must be "saved from" by a harsh warning voice and a male hand that seizes her and forcibly wrenches her away from what she really wants, her own image, to submit to another "less winning soft, less amiably mild, /Than that smooth wat'ry image" (4.479-80). Henceforth, she obeys: "I yielded, and from that time see/ How beauty is excell'd by manly grace" (4.489-90). Capitulating to male desire, she becomes vulnerable to the male gazes, including the narrator's: she "half imbracing lean'd 1On our first Father, half her swelling Breast 1Naked met his" (4.494-97). That must explain why Eve is the one who is selected to be tempted by the exhibitionist wish. That must explain why Eve is the one who wants to look, to reclaim her desire, and that must explain why Eve, when she does seize the spectatorial position, must be punished-with death, yes, but also with child- bearing. Eve's maternity comes into the world as a curse. The woman's preoedipal attachment to her mother is so threatening to the patriarchy that would wrench her from it that Eve cannot have a mother at all, and her own mothering must be painful. I am not going to rewrite this skewed story to redeem Eve, to give her back her gaze, partly because my whole discussion above of the dynamics of the scopic drive is intended to show that she never lost it, and that such biological reduc- tionism teaches us nothing about gender d i f f e r e n ~ e . ~ ~ I will only add that such a reading strikes me as being thoroughly complicitous with the very oedipal logic it means to critique, for it, like the model of female sexuality it depends on, is an account of Eve's development within the dictates of patriarchy. Eve resists being assimilated to such patriarchal logic; she resists it, as all Milton readers know well, when she refuses to succumb to Adam's desire that she work at his side, and she resists it when she chooses to eat the apple Satan offers her. Victims are not granted such choice. In these scenes Eve voices the same logic that God does and that Milton does in Areopagztica to defend her freedom and her desire: If this be our condition, thus to dwell In narrow circuit strait'n'd by a Foe, Subtle or violent, we not endu'd Single with like defense, wherever met, How are we happy, still in fear of harm? (9.322-26) Victims are not given such lines. Instead, because her narrative is framed, I am going to look at the figure who narrates her story, asking whether the gaze of the narrator, like that of the cinematic apparatus, is the male gaze. Any account of voyeurism in Milton must come to terms with the narrator's looking, especially with how Milton characterizes it in his invocations. Politically disempowered, blind and imprisoned, the narrator expresses his sense of victim- ization: "on evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; / In darkness, and with dan- gers compast round, I And solitude" (7.26-28). He portrays himself as the exhibit before a deity that is all-seeing-"Heav'n hides nothing from thy viewn-and he conjures his audience, fit though few. He visits a lamp that may illuminate him, but that does not enable him to see-"Thou I Revist'st not these eyes, that roll in vain I To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn" (3.22-24). Descriptions of Mil- ton's patriarchy must survive this narrator's complaint that he is not only denied sight, he is denied the gaze. As Modleski concludes of Hitchcock's films, "The strong fascination and identification with femininity revealed in them subverts the claims to mastery and authority not only of the male characters but of the director himself."34 At the core of Milton's myth of the Fall is Adam's identification with Eve, an attraction that makes him fail to embrace that "masculine autonomy" Raphael instructs him in. "Fondly overcome by female charm," that is, thoroughly feminized, our first man drags the whole race of men after him into the "emas- culinization" of mortality. When the narrator does dare to look, it is with the fear that he will be punished, as Eve is, for his guilty seeing-"May I express thee unblam'd?"-and he only takes a peek with many nervous allusions to safety (3.21; 7.15, 24) and with a masochistic identification with the specter of Orpheus torn to pieces by the wild rout. Can we trust this complaint, or is the narrator really masking his voyeurism, an insistent wish to "see and tell of things invisible to mortal sight"? Or conversely, is his ambition to look a defense against, not exactly victimization, but an exhibitionism that is tied to those familiar character- izations of Milton's egotism? Even overtly, the blind narrator's response to his unseeing exhibitionism is not only to feel victimized. He defends himself in the poem in the same way that Milton defended himself in The Second Defense of the English People against his enemies' charge that his blindness was punishment for his political heresy: he claims that his blindness is better than their sight. That Rethinking Voyeurism and Patriarchy 99 boast that his darkness is superior sounds like the predictable reaction to being an exhibit. Now the narrator has become the powerful voyeur, swollen with that ambition familiar from Milton's youth to "at Heav'ns door I Look in, and see each blissful Deity."35 William Kerrigan and W. B. C. Watkins have commented on the "phallic aggression" conferred on images of seeing throughout the poem.36 But if these invocations become occasions for the narrator to enact the polarizations of aggressive voyeur and passive exhibit, of sadism and masochism, it is only to reject those formulas. His sight depends upon the light looking inward-"So much the rather thou Celestial LightIShine inward, and the mind through all her powers I Irradiatex-to enable him to see outward-"There plant eyes, all mist from thence I Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell I Of things invisible to mortal sight" (3.51-55). In his formulation, this narrator is illuminated so that he can see. The epic begins, "What is dark in me,/Illumine." This is not the depiction of a passive victim peered at through the keyhole; this is a portrayal of an active exhibit, one presaged in Milton's early revealing expression of his ambi- tion: "I have some naked thoughts that rove aboutlAnd loudly knock to have their passage out."37 And yet, for all his thundering aggression, the maturer Tuscan artist peers through his optic glass "less assur'd" to imagine Paradise Lost. Notes A version of this essay was read at the Third International Milton Symposium in Flor- ence, Italy, June 1988, and at the Newberry Milton Seminar in Chicago in May 1989. I want to thank the members of those audiences for their many helpful responses and James Kincaid for inspiration. 1. Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321-47. 2. Some of the poem's other myriad concerns and their relation to scopophilia are elab- orated in Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation i n Paradise Lost (Cambridge, 1988). 3. Star- (or moon-) gazing occurs again in the temptation dream, in the temptation itself, in a key dialogue between Adam and Eve, and in a lengthier discussion between Adam and Raphael. In a broader sense, the heavens are the focus of Raphael's attention as he tells of the rebellion in heaven and the Creation, and the object of the narrator's gaze as he recounts the divine council. When the narrator's Muse is given a proper name, it is Urania, the muse of astronomy. But Milton is not just fixated on the stars for their own sake (although that is no small focus in an era when the astronomical theories of the "new science" were the subject of hot debate), and his Adam does not only ask how the stars move in the skies-he asks about the limits of knowledge. 4. Sigmund Freud, "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," in The Standard Edition of the Com- plete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1974), 14:109-40; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978), 78. Lacan would regard fixation in