Reversing the Fall in Book 10
Has Milton nodded? Though little noticed, there is a logical problem in the order of events in book 10. We are told (10.332–45) that Satan witnessed the Fall but fled terrified from the Son who came to judge Adam and Eve, then returned to eavesdrop on the couple and learned of God’s decree upon him, “which understood / Not instant but of future doom” (10.344–45); this conversation is the one between Adam and Eve that begins at 10.867 and concludes the book. Satan now meets with Sin and Death on the outside of the universe and discovers the bridge they have built to hell; they started to build the bridge before the Fall and Judgment (10.220), which by now have taken place. Satan sends them to ravage God’s new world (10.346–409); he meanwhile proceeds along the bridge to stage a triumph in Pandaemonium, which will backfire on him as he and his fellow devils are transformed into serpents (10.410–584). Sin and Death set to work (10.585–613), and it is at the sight of Satan’s children entering his creation that God himself reacts, and alters the universe and the earth’s weather (10.613–714). Adam himself reacts to these changes in a long soliloquy of despair (10.715–866). At this point Eve enters the scene and the dialogue and reconciliation of the couple ensues, the conversation that Satan has supposedly already overheard, but which he cannot have done, since he has, in fact, triggered it—through Sin and Death, God’s ensuing action, and Adam’s consequent despair. The narrative circles back on itself in a moebius strip or loop.1 Milton may have made a mistake in the epic’s chronology, but it is not like him to have done so. He would have been able to correct it, had he so chosen, in the second edition in 1674.
One effect of the confused order of events is to entangle the narratives of Satan and Adam and Eve—the falls of the angels and of mankind, whose parallels have heretofore structured Paradise Lost—at the very moment when the poem decisively separates and distinguishes them. From the point at which the despairing Adam declares himself in soliloquy “To Satan only like both crime and doom” (10.841) and cast into an abyss “out of which / I find no way” (10.843–44), fortunes for humanity in fact begin to change. The logic and unity of book 10 depend on the contrast it draws between, on the one hand, Satan and the devils, who in the first half of the book (10.235–584) seem to have achieved their high point of victory over humanity and God only to find themselves back where they started and further degraded in hell, and, on the other, Adam and Eve, who, in the book’s second half (10.715–1104), climb up from their low point of despair to reconcile with each other and to reestablish a line of communication with their forgiving Creator. The impossible narrative feedback loop of book 10 suggests no way out of the book itself. It corresponds to the recursive nature of sin that Adam recognizes in his anguish and that indeed characterizes the permanent plight of Satan and his fellow fallen angels, condemned forever to go around in circles. But the regenerate Adam and Eve do escape from book 10 and from this vortex of fallenness: the couple will continue into the last books of the poem, while the devil is left behind.
The dialogue between Adam and Eve that Satan is supposed to—but logically cannot—have overheard constitutes the “Crisis of Paradise Lost,” as E. M. Tillyard terms it in a profound and classic essay, the moment when the human pair become the true heroes of the poem in Satan’s place. Tillyard saw the restoration of love between the first couple and of the recovery of hope for a human future not only as the dramatic hinge of the poem but also as Milton’s artistic wager: “The main point therefore now is whether in actual fact, as we read, the reconciliation of Adam and Eve and their repentance before God have sufficient weight in the poem to balance the grandeur of Satan and his doings in the first books.”2 The humbleness of a conversation between husband and wife, rebuilding bridges after a terrible quarrel, becomes a graver subject in Milton’s epic than the conventional epic of war and empire that finds its Virgilian emblem in the colossal, lifeless bridge that Sin and Death, the book’s other couple, build across Chaos. The grandeur of the devils at the opening of the poem has in any case fallen in book 10 into the grotesqueness of Sin and Death and the final metamorphosis into ash-chewing snakes of Satan and his crew. The colloquy of Adam and Eve ends in their humbling themselves before the deity they have offended, the Christian moral counterpart to the aesthetic humility of the scene itself.
The reconciliation of Adam and Eve, the new heroic arena of Paradise Lost, thus takes place in book 10 against a design that involves Satan, and, as we shall see, the Son as well. An understanding of this design, which precisely concerns beginnings and endings, is a necessary prelude to a discussion of what Milton is doing with his human heroes. Its terms are drawn, as I have just suggested, from Virgil’s Aeneid, whose glorification of imperial power and greatness makes it the epic model that the Christian humility of Paradise Lost most insistently measures itself against and self-consciously inverts. As a Protestant poet, Milton was bound to oppose the Aeneid’s story of Roman power without end, a story that had been eagerly enough embraced by a Roman Catholic papacy that claimed to be the empire’s inheritor.3 It is also the epic that consistently asserts, in Aeneas’s loss of Creusa and abandonment of Dido, the incompatibility of marriage and love with the historical mission of its hero: Odyssean domesticity and eros are assigned to the first half of the Aeneid and give way to the conquest and battles of its Iliadic second half. In Paradise Lost, marital love becomes its human heroes’ goal after the Son and Satan and their respective forces have fought their epic battles in heaven at the poem’s midpoint. The Odyssey half of Milton’s epic—the story of a private couple—supersedes its Iliad half, the grand, all-inclusive history of God and devil, in a pointed reversal both of Virgil’s sequence (itself an inversion of Homeric sequence) and of the Roman poet’s apparent ethical priorities. The first section of this chapter shows how Milton’s studied Virgilian allusions organize and unify the action of book 10 up to the dramatic dialogue of Adam and Eve. The ultimately aimless circularity of the exploits of Satan and his children, Sin and Death, contrasts with the closed, apocalyptic plot accomplished by the victory of the Son, an epic closure that is itself supplemented—and superseded—by his ensuing act of creating a new universe. The open-ended future that begins for Adam and Eve is measured against both of these narrative models and their ethical possibilities: the potential for relapse as well as for creative perseverance. For if the human pair replace Satan as heroes of Paradise Lost, Satan, before he disappears from the scene of the poem, has already announced his own successors in Sin and Death. He sends them into the universe as his “Plenipotent” (10.404) substitutes. In the hall of mirrors set up by book 10, Satan’s children are shadowy doubles, not only for the Son but for Adam and Eve themselves: they will dog the steps of mankind until the end of time.4
Death is, in fact, an option in the dialogue of Adam and Eve, discussed in the chapter’s second section: Eve’s proposal that they commit a Stoic suicide would end their story, just as Satan’s story ends, inside the confines of book 10. But just having an option already distinguishes Adam and Eve from Satan. Unlike the fallen angels, who in book 2 discover no end for their hopeless condition because they cannot die, Adam and Eve find that they have the freedom to die, and therefore can choose to live. They choose to humble themselves before God, while God humiliates the punningly “Reluctant” (10.515) Satan, writhing and unwilling, as a snake. The recovery of choice—of free will—allows the first humans and the poem to go forward.
Adam and Eve choose, above all, to love each other again. There appeared to be “no end” (9.1189) of their mutual accusation at the close of book 9, just as the War in Heaven could have gone on forever—“in perpetual fight they needs must last / Endless” (6.693–94), God had declared—until the Son steps in to stop both conflicts. Book 10 breaks this impasse, but not before Adam drops one rung further down into despair and launches into a misogynistic tirade at Eve’s approach (10.867–908). “Out of my sight, thou serpent,” cries the angry husband, and we have to wonder how much of his own first marriage to Mary Powell the sightless poet revisits at this moment.5
Adam’s is a literally textbook misogyny, culled, as we shall see in the chapter’s third section, from the best classical sources—Euripides’s woman-hating Hippolytus and Hesiod’s Pandora. These are of a piece with two other misogynistic stories to which Milton alludes to and revises in book 10: the tragedy of Virgil’s abandoned Dido, the most prestigious of epic heroines, and the biblical account of the concubine exposed by her husband at Gibeah in Judges 19. Milton’s rewriting of these stories—and he will also glance at Virgil’s Creusa at the end of Paradise Lost—in order to correct their misogynistic tenor constitute another pattern that unifies the larger book and that reflects Adam’s own change of heart. Adam and the Genesis story itself seem to invent a subsequent tradition of Western literary misogyny, but he and Milton’s book 10 take it back as part of the book’s larger reversal of the effects of the Fall: we learn not to identify that tradition with Milton’s Eve, nor with her daughters. The temptation to blame women is the last of the “evasions vain” (10.829) by which Adam in his preceding soliloquy admits to trying to avoid his own responsibility for his misery (he has already tried to shift the blame to Eve in the Judgment Scene at the book’s beginning). It is the final obstacle that needs to be overcome before Adam can love Eve, and before the reunited couple can chart their way out of the recursive fold of the narrative of book 10. In his portrait of Adam’s mixed emotions and not always noble actions, Milton is perhaps facing up, more than two decades later, to his own role in the rocky beginning of his first marriage. But that marriage, too, went forward.
Virgilian Coordinates and the End of Satan
Milton shapes the fiction of book 10 through multiple allusions to beginnings and endings in Virgil’s Aeneid, and these fit, in turn, into a larger pattern in Paradise Lost. We have seen in chapter 1 how the opening of the epic depicts Satan struggling to tend off the Dead Sea–like burning lake and its Sodom-like rain of fire, to find a “harbour” in hell (1.184–85) as Aeneas seeks a haven for his fleet along the shores of Carthage after the storm that opens book 1 of the Aeneid. Chapter 5 noted how the duel that fails to take place between Gabriel and Satan at the end of book 4 pointedly avoids a repeat of the narrative ending of the Aeneid and the killing by Aeneas of Turnus. Milton, instead, looks for an idea of an ending in the chronological endpoint projected by Virgil’s epic, the future victory of Augustus Caesar over Antony at Actium and the subsequent triumph of Augustus in Rome, events of Virgil’s own lifetime prophesied as the end, goal and conclusion, of history and sculpted by Vulcan on the shield Venus bestows on Aeneas at the conclusion of Aeneid 8. These Virgilian coordinates of book 10 are charted in the table below:
Milton divides the opening scene of the Aeneid, where the speech of Neptune calms the violent storm winds sent by Aeolus at the prompting of Juno—what precedes Aeneas’s making for a harbor at Carthage—into two separate episodes in order first to depict the Son’s creative word calming Chaos, thus starting up the second half of Paradise Lost. He returns to this Virgilian scene in book 10 to describe, by way of contrast and parody, how Sin and Death create through lethal force the bridge that connects earth to hell. That bridge also recalls the final image on the shield of Aeneas, the bridge Augustus rebuilt over the Araxes River, and in effect connects in book 10 both of these Virgilian coordinates: the beginning storm of the Aeneid and that poem’s prophetic vision of Augustan imperialism and closure upon history. Milton similarly divides up this latter Virgilian scene of imperial triumph into contrasting episodes of Paradise Lost. He uses it to portray, on the one hand, the victory of the Son in the War in Heaven and his subsequent entry in triumph into heaven in book 6, an ending that climaxes the first half of the twelve-book 1674 version of the epic and that anticipates the Son’s apocalyptic victory over Satan at the true end of history. On the other, Milton depicts the would-be triumph of Satan, celebrating his seduction of humanity in book 10, as a false ending that only returns Satan back to where he began, to the hell that re-evokes the Carthage and Libya of the opening of the Aeneid. Milton returns yet again in book 10 to the same opening episode of the Aeneid, to the still earlier moment when the storm winds of Aeolus are first unleashed. As an effect of the Fall, the winds of the earth are released from their prison, matched by the storm of Adam’s human passion. Adam has fallen into a Chaos or hell of despair: Will he be able to make his way out?
Through his rewritings of it, Milton engages in a critical reading of the famous first simile of the Aeneid. Virgil compares Neptune’s calling upon the winds to desist and to return to their imprisonment under their king Aeolus to the words of an unarmed citizen, renowned for his piety and service, calming a great people that rages (saeuit) in civil strife (Aen. 1.148–53). As we indicated in chapter 5, Milton reproduces this scenario in book 11 in the vision that Michael offers to Adam of Enoch who similarly tries to calm a city fallen into “factious opposition” (11.664)—only to have the crowd hoot him down: Enoch is only saved from their violence by his timely translation into heaven. Milton’s version belies the ostensible content of Virgil’s simile that most commentators from the Renaissance onward have read straightforwardly as an equation of Neptune’s speech with the pacifying words of the statesman.6 Both god and statesman appear to be figures for Augustus, the restorer of rationality and order to a Rome wracked by civil wars: an announcement in this first simile of the ideological stakes in the poem that is to follow. But Milton has detected the potential irony that Virgil already built into the simile, for Neptune, unlike the orator, is armed, and he not only calms but threatens the winds with his fierce trident (“saeuum tridentem”; Aen. 1.138). The adjective indicates a violence in kind that corresponds and responds to the violence of the raging crowd in the simile, as well as to the violence of fierce Juno, who has fomented the storm in the first place, “saeuae … Iunonis” as she is evoked in the fourth verse of the Aeneid —and it suggests the element of force that not only backs up Neptune’s words but the reason of state of Augustus. Virgil is having it two ways.
So does Milton as he breaks the simile apart in the action of Paradise Lost; he imitates the calming of the storm twice.7 In book 7, the Son begins the act of creating the universe by bringing peace to the storms of Chaos, which is assimilated with the “Deep” of Genesis 1:
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven’s highth, and with the centre mix the pole.
Silence, ye troubled waves, and thou deep, peace,
Said then the omnific Word, your discord end:
(7.212–17)
Chaos, we are told by Raphael, hears the Son’s voice (221) and turns into a “watery calm” (234), ready to be infused with the vital virtue of creation.8 Here, as in book 2, Chaos is like a “dark / Illimitable ocean” (2.891–92), and the Son’s command recalls Neptune’s speech that sends the winds of Aeolus back to their king. There is an explicit echo here of Virgil’s storm in Aeneid 1 that churns up the sea from its lowest depths: “a sedibus imis” (Aen. 1.84). The quieting of the discord of Chaos through the omnific Word of God alone aligns the Son with the weaponless orator-statesman of Virgil’s simile. The scene also conflates the Virgilian model with a future calming of a storm on the Sea of Galilee by the same Son: “And he arose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm” (Mark 4:39).
In book 10, this sublime scene of creation is parodied when Sin and Death build their bridge across Chaos from hell to God’s new universe: Rte. 666. Here, too, a stillness is imposed on the waves of Chaos, but it is the stillness of death.9
what they met
Solid or slimy, as in raging sea
Tossed up and down, together crowded drove
From each side shoaling towards the mouth of hell.
As when two polar winds blowing adverse
Upon the Cronian sea, together drive
Mountains of ice, that stop the imagined way
Beyond Petsora eastward to the rich
Cathaian coast. The aggregated soil
Death with his mace petrific, cold and dry,
As with a trident smote …
(10.285–95)
Sin and Death first act like the winds of Aeolus themselves, making the sea of Chaos rage; Death finishes the job with his petrifying mace that, with its comparison to a trident, carries associations with Neptune and returns us to the opening scene of the Aeneid. Milton’s fiction activates the force with which Virgil’s Neptune threatens any recalcitrant storm winds and here the force proves both lethal, the icy grip of death, and, in its source, indistinguishable from the disorder to which it puts an end. Built out of imitations of the same Aeneid episode, out of the vehicle (the statesman) and the tenor (Neptune and his trident) of its first simile, Milton’s contrast between the two episodes of creation could not be clearer. The spiritual goodness of the “omnific Word” of the Son creates new life, the wonderful architecture of the universe, out of the discord of Chaos; the children of Satan use carnal force to make a lifeless edifice. Virgil’s Romans were superb builders of roads—roads for military purposes above all—but this is what their and other attempts at human empire building could amount to: so Tacitus has the British chieftain Galgacus, a character in Milton’s own History of Britain, remark of the Roman conquerors of his island, “they make a wasteland and call it peace” (Agricola 1.30).10
ANTI-TRIUMPHS
In fact, the building by Sin and Death of their causeway across Chaos alludes not only to the opening of the Aeneid but to a symbol of imperial conquest that brings Virgil’s epic to a kind of historical end point and high point at the close of its book 8. Aeneas beholds the new shield that the God Vulcan has made for him, sculpted with scenes of future Roman history and its triumphs. The god’s prophetic vision and the poet’s historical hindsight culminate in the triumph of Augustus in 29 BCE, and the ekphrastic description of the shield concludes with an image-within-the-image, the representation carried in the triumphal procession of the Armenian river Araxes, where Roman power bordered on the Parthian Empire, and of the bridge that Augustus rebuilt over it—“pontem indignatus Araxes” (Aen. 8.728). This image of imperial permanence over the flux of time miniaturizes the shield that, in turn, miniaturizes Virgil’s epic, and it underscores the sense of an ending that the shield projects: that Roman history from the time of Aeneas has been leading up to and concludes in the power of Augustus.
The “high arched” (10.301) bridge that Sin and Death build over Chaos, which now appears to be a kind of triumphal arch to greet Satan as he returns from earth to hell—“Triumphal with triumphal act have met / Mine with this glorious work” (10.390–91),11 the devil declares—is a version of Augustus’s bridge on a colossal scale.
The other way Satan went down
The causey to hell gate; on either side
Disparted chaos over built exclaimed,
And with rebounding surge the bars assailed,
That scorned his indignation;
(10.414–18)
“Pontem indignatus Araxes”: Milton insists on the echo; we hear the same indignation earlier in the simile that compares the bridge of Sin and Death to another imperial undertaking.
So, if great things to small may be compared,
Xerxes, the liberty of Greece to yoke,
From Susa his Memnonian palace high
Came to the sea, and over Hellespont
Bridging his way, Europe with Asia joined,
And scourged with many a stroke the indignant waves.
(10.306–11)
Milton borrows the simile from Lucan’s De bello civile 2.672–77, where it describes, in turn, another Caesarian project, the building by Julius Caesar of a causeway across the harbor of Brindisi, where he sought, unsuccessfully, to block the escape of the fleet of Pompey and the defenders of the republic.12 But the figure of Xerxes is also linked to Virgil’s Araxes. Servius glossed the Aeneid 8 passage: “this is a river in Armenia which Xerxes was unable to mount with bridges, and upon which Alexander the Great built a bridge, but the flooding of the river broke it; later Augustus bound it with a stronger bridge, whence it is called, to the glory of Augustus, ‘the Araxes indignant at its bridge.’ ”13
The glory of Augustus may not last, however, if the experience of his conqueror predecessors with the river is any evidence. This concluding tag of the description of the shield of Aeneas, like the opening simile of the Aeneid, is potentially ironic, and here, too, we can watch Milton exploiting a doubleness already present in his Virgilian model as he rewrites its scene of imperial triumph. Both of Xerxes’s bridge projects fail: he has troops scourge the indignant waves of the Hellespont because a storm there washed his pontoon bridge away, just as the Araxes broke his bridge. Alexander has no better luck with the Araxes, and these precedents, in turn, cast doubt in the Aeneid on the permanence of Augustus’s imperial achievement. By giving the last word of the description of the shield to the indignant Araxes, Virgil hints at another future washing away of the bridge and of new dangers massing at Rome’s frontier, a flood of Parthians ready to overflow their boundaries, the same Parthians, “outpoured” from their capital Ctesiphon (PR 3.311), that Satan would put at the disposition of Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained to free Israel from the Roman yoke. We should similarly conclude that, despite their use of “pins of adamant” (10.318) that recall the “adamantinos … clavos” of Horace’s Necessity (Odes 3.24.4–7) and that make this punning hell’s pont all “too fast … / And durable” (PL 10.319–20), the bridge of Sin and Death is not built to last. No earthly power, human or demonic, is lasting, for the earth itself will pass way. In fact, in the same narrative sequence God will foretell the apocalyptic victory of the Son over both Sin and Death (PL 10.631–39) and, in a moment that might give pause to Milton’s reader, the angels sing hallelujah (10.642) at the instant that the two are set loose into the world. The good news is that the triumph of Satan, Sin, and Death is fleeting in the eyes of eternity; the bad news is that their bridge will last until the end of human history: long enough.
The building of the bridge over Chaos thus combines the beginning of the Aeneid, the calming of the storm winds that strike Aeneas off the coast of Carthage, with the ending Virgil’s epic projects beyond the story of Aeneas himself, the triumph of Augustus epitomized in his bridge over the indignant Araxes. Like the raising of Pandaemonium in book 1, the episode builds a Rome in one day, a Rome that is both the empire of Virgil’s poem and, with its “wondrous art / Pontifical” (10.312–13) a modern-day papal Rome that through Spanish and Portuguese conquest would extend its power over the “new world” (2.403) and, through the masked Catholicism of the treacherous Stuarts, to the “happy isle” (2.410) of England as well. But these are the small things, mere human empires, to which the great satanic Rome is compared. Milton’s fiction dwarfs the Rome celebrated by the Aeneid, and in the construction of the bridge that collapses the opening and historical closure of Virgil’s poem, he effectively dwarfs the Aeneid itself, reducing it to some forty verses (10.282–324): the biggest Aeneid ever told in the shortest number of lines. At the same time, he suggests the short-circuited nature of this miniature epic of Satan’s children, whose end is already built into its beginning: their bridge is fated, like Roman triumphal arches still visible in Milton’s and our own day, to be a ruin of a fallen empire.
THE TRIUMPHS OF THE SON
As he has done with the scene of Neptune calming the storm at the beginning of the Aeneid, Milton has similarly distributed his rewriting of this scene on the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8 into two separate and contrasting episodes, the triumph of the Son after the War in Heaven at the end of book 6 and its parody in Satan’s triumphant return to hell along the bridge that his offspring have built in book 10. Where Virgil depicts an end to history two-thirds of the way through his epic, Milton gestures to a similar finality halfway through the twelve-book 1674 Paradise Lost: the Son’s defeat of Satan in book 6 and the subsequent creation of the universe in book 7 anticipate the apocalyptic battle of Revelation and the creation of a new heaven and new earth at the end of Christian history. The War in Heaven from which the Son returns victorious is itself modeled on Virgil’s depiction of Actium on the shield, a battle that is in part a heavenly conflict between the Olympian gods and the monster gods of Cleopatra’s East (Aen. 8.698–700).14 The Son receives the acclamation of the angel citizens of heaven.
Sole victor from the expulsion of his foes
Messiah his triumphal chariot turned:
To meet him all his saints, who silent stood
Eye witnesses of his almighty acts,
With jubilee advanced; and as they went,
Shaded with branching palm, each order bright,
Sung triumph, and him sung victorious king,
Son, heir, and Lord, to him dominion given,
Worthiest to reign: he celebrated rode
Triumphant through mid heaven, into the courts
And temple of his mighty Father throned
On high: who in glory him received,
Where now he sits at the right hand of bliss.
(6.880–92)
The Son rides into the forecourts of the temple of his mighty Father and sits at the right hand of bliss, where Virgil’s Augustus sits on the threshold of the temple of his divine patron, possibly his divine father, Apollo (Aen. 8.720–22).15 The triumph of Augustus projects the fictional world of the Aeneid into Virgil’s own time and constitutes a culmination and endpoint of the Roman history that is founded in the poem. The Son’s triumph, which takes place before human history properly begins, is prophetic both of his triumph over Satan and sin at the Crucifixion—so the Son, in an adaptation of Colossians 2:15, has prophesied: “I through the ample air in triumph high / Shall lead hell captive maugre hell, and show / The powers of darkness bound” (3.254–56; cf. also 12.451–58)—and equally of his triumph over Satan at the end of history at the Last Judgment: Michael ends his narration of history to Adam with the same terminal word “bliss”: “To bring forth fruits joy and eternal bliss” (12.551).16 (In its thirty-seven appearances in Paradise Lost, “bliss” comes at the end of the verse twenty-five times, in a kind of verbal tic.) The Son’s acclamation by the palm-bearing angels thus anticipates his entrance as Jesus into Jerusalem to a chorus of hosannas on Palm Sunday—itself a version in humility that mocks the pride of the Roman triumph—and his entrance into the temple that initiates the Passion (John 12:12–16, Matt. 21:1–17, Mark 11:1–11, Luke 19). It also anticipates the gathering of the saints before the throne of the Lamb at the end of time (Rev. 7:9–10).
The Son of God takes the place of Virgil’s “diui genus” (Aen. 6.792), Augustus Caesar, and will, Michael foretells to Adam, “bound his reign / With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the heavens” (12.370–71) as Virgil’s Jupiter prophesies of Augustus: “imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris” (Aen. 1.287). Milton’s claiming this triumphal Virgilian typology for his God does not, however, turn the heaven of Paradise Lost into Dante’s Rome in which Christ is a Roman (Purg. 32.102), which would confer a special divine historical dispensation on the Roman Empire and on Virgil, its poetic celebrant and Dante’s guide. To the contrary, we should understand Virgil’s Augustus to be imitating the triumph of the Son—the Aeneid in effect imitating the fiction of Paradise Lost rather than the other way around—and, in doing so, to be idolatrously attempting to play God, the only legitimate king.17 Human tyrants, of whom Nimrod, foretold by Michael in book 12 of Paradise Lost, is the prototype, falsely claim “second sovereignty” (PL 12.35) from heaven, a supposed divine right of kings. Adam answers Michael by asserting that God gave human beings dominion only over the other animals.
that right we hold
By his donation; but man over men
He made not lord; such title to himself
Reserving, human left from human free.
(12.68–71)
The distinguishing of true from false donations seems particularly pointed, an attack not merely on temporal monarchy but on the temporal power and monarchical pretensions of the papacy, which, through the so-called Donation of Constantine, claimed to be the heir of the Roman Empire.18 But that empire, the Rome of Virgil and Augustus, was itself a carnal and profane copy, or diabolic parody, of divine monarchy.19
Milton, moreover, stages, at the end of book 7, a second entrance of the Son into heaven-Jerusalem and into “God’s eternal house” (7.576) and “imperial throne” (7.585) that outdoes his triumph after the War in Heaven at the end of book 6: “greater now in thy return / Than from the giant angels; thee that day / Thy thunders magnified; but to create / Is greater than created to destroy” (7.604–7)—the angels sing to the Father, Jehovah (7.602), whose power, manifested in the Son, has topped its earlier achievement. The thirteen verses that described the Son’s triumph have now expanded to eighty-two (7.551–632), as the Son returns from creating the universe
Up to the heaven of heavens his high abode
Thence to behold this new created world,
The addition of his empire, how it showed
In prospect from his throne, how good, how fair
Answering his great idea. Up he rode
Followed with acclamation and the sound
Symphonious of ten thousand harps that tuned
Angelic harmonies: the earth, the air
Resounded …
(7.553–61)
The music of the angels is amplified by a rare Miltonic use of rhyme—“abode/showed/rode,” “fair/air”—and his more customary internal rhyming: “sound/thousand/Resounded,” “harps/harmonies,” which enacts the resounding it describes. Milton is pulling out all the stops in order to make us feel the greater magnitude of the event. As a supplement to the War in Heaven, God has added to his “empire,” but he has done so pointedly by creation, not by the war and conquest celebrated in the Roman triumph and depicted in the Virgilian model that stands behind the Son’s earlier victorious entry into heaven. That model now seems to be left behind altogether, and Paradise Lost suggests that it has been doubly superseded.
SATAN’S TRIUMPH
By the time, then, that the satanic forces of Paradise Lost themselves produce in book 10 their own would-be Virgilian triumph, it can only be an empty parody of the Son’s triumph—and, as we have seen, Satan’s children also parody the Son’s life-giving act of creation by their use of deadly force. They thus disclose the true demonic nature of such human—especially Roman—imperial projects. Satan, indeed, has just made himself the prince of this world, and subjected God’s creation and humanity to Sin and Death, as well as to his fellow devils who now have free access to the earth on the bridge that his children have built, “To range in, and to dwell, and over man / To rule” (10.492–93), he tells them in Pandaemonium. They have something to celebrate, and Milton’s belittling Satan’s accomplishment and putting a damper on their festivity can smack of denial and whistling in the dark. Here, too, Milton makes his point by manipulating the Virgilian coordinates of his poem, collapsing together in this episode the sense of an ending contained in the triumph of Augustus on the shield of Aeneas with the shipwreck and disarray on the coastline of Libya that opens the Aeneid. Satan and his devils will turn out to have achieved no conclusive victory over mankind and God, and they finish up not only back where they began in hell, but in even greater degradation.
Milton precedes the episode in book 10 by reminding us, once again, of what Satan and his companions are parodying: the narrator refers, in an even more direct citation of Colossians 2:15, to the future triumph of the Son at the Crucifixion, when he “rising from his grave / Spoiled principalities and powers, triumphed / In open show” (10.185–87). The episode then divides into two parts. First, Sin and Death, the very principalities and powers whom the Son will despoil, build their triumphal arch (like Augustus’s bridge over the Araxes, waiting its destruction), and meet their father; then Satan returns to Pandaemonium expecting acclaim from his fellow devils of the kind the Son received from the angels in heaven: he promises “to lead ye forth / Triumphant out of this infernal pit” across the newly created bridge to God’s new creation and to earth (10.463–64), an exodus that would parody the Son’s harrowing of hell. Instead, he and they are transformed into serpents.
Satan ends his speech to the assembled chiefs of the fallen angels on the same terminal word, “bliss,” which had ended Raphael’s description of the Son’s triumph to the acclaim of the singing angels in book 6; he invites the devils to enter into full “bliss,” as he had shortly before told Sin and Death to descend to Paradise: “There dwell and reign in bliss” (10.399).
what remains, ye gods,
But up and enter now into full bliss.
So having said, a while he stood, expecting
Their universal shout and high applause
To fill his ear, when contrary he hears
On all sides, from innumerable tongues
A dismal universal hiss, the sound
Of public scorn;
(10.502–9)
“Bliss” turns into a divine joke on Satan, for, far from indicating an achieved ending, it already indicates that he is being transformed, along with all the other devils around him, into a hissing serpent.20 “Thus was the applause they meant, / Turned to exploding hiss, triumph to shame / Cast on themselves from their own mouths” (10.545–47). Deprived of their triumph, this metamorphosis further compels the devils comically to fall down, “supplanted” (10.513), and to reenact a parodic version of original sin, attracted to a grove “laden with fair fruit, like that / Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve / Used by the tempter” (10.550–52), only to find it to taste of bitter ashes, “like that which grew / Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed” (10.561–62). The Dead Sea fruits of Sodom were supposed to turn to ashes in one’s hands; these go one better and refuse to melt in the mouths of the serpent-devils, who have to chew them and spit them out over and over again, falling repeatedly “Into the same illusion, not as man / Whom they triumphed once lapsed” (10.571–72).
The whole scene not only depicts Satan’s literal return to hell but also brings him back to the beginning of the poem, and suggests that his heroic career has gone in a circle and made no real progress at all. As we noted in chapter 1, he finds himself again in the same symbolic landscape of hell, but a landscape raised to a new level of quasi-burlesque grotesqueness in which he is forced to participate. Through the ashy fruit, it is another version of Sodom and the Dead Sea21—and through the snake metamorphosis, it is another version of the Libyan desert beside Carthage as well.
dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters head and tail,
Scorpion and asp, and amphisbaena dire,
Cerastes horned, hydrus, and ellops drear,
And dipsas (not so thick swarmed once the soil
Bedropped with blood of Gorgon, or the isle
Of Ophiusa)
(10.521–28)
The soil sprinkled with the blood of the Gorgon Medusa is Libya in the account that Lucan gives in the De bello civile (BC 9.619–937) of why the region teems in venomous serpents: among its snakes are the amphisbaena, cerastes, and dipsas—and Lucan also describes a particularly deadly scorpion (BC 9.833–36). Milton’s poem returns with Satan to the Carthaginian-Libyan landscape of its opening book and of the opening of the Aeneid, now demonized even further as a realm of serpents and poison. The biggest of these snakes is Satan himself, likened to “whom the sun / Ingendered in the Pythian vale on slime, / Huge Python” (10.529–31); this last simile describing Satan returns us again to the beginning of the poem and to the first simile that governs our first sight of him: “in bulk as huge / As whom the fables name of monstrous size, / Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, / Briareos or Typhon” (1.196–99). Huge Typhon, huge Python: the two snaky monsters were identified with each other through mythographical conflation and typographical inversion, and Milton’s pattern suggests reversion and circularity.22 Satan exits the poem in simile as he had entered it. If the Son’s triumph corresponds to the politico-historical climax or “ending” of the Aeneid at the end of its book 8, Satan’s failed parody of that triumph brings him back to where he started in Paradise Lost, and back to the corresponding beginning of the Aeneid as well: in a doomed Carthage rather than all-victorious Rome. Even the hiss of the mutually entangled (“complicated”) devils-turned-serpents—“hissing through the hall, thick swarming now”—merely repeats the noise and situation of their initial entrance into Pandaemonium in book 1, as they bumped into each other in its too narrow confines: “Thick swarmed, both on the ground and in the air / Brushed with the hiss of rustling wings” (1.767–68).23 The sense that the devils and their evil have gone around in a circle and will only keep doing so is strengthened by the report—“some say”—that they must repeat their metamorphosis: “Yearly enjoined, some say, to undergo / This annual humbling certain numbered days” (10.575–76), a compulsory feast of atonement. Condemned with the serpent at the opening of book 10 “Upon thy belly grovelling thou shalt go” (10.177), Satan is last glimpsed in Paradise Lost as “A monstrous serpent on his belly prone” (10.514); he is in the same “abject posture” (1.322) in which he was first found, “prone on the flood” (1.195) with his “Grovelling and prostrate” (1.280) companions: there a storm-tossed Aeneas seeking a harbor near Carthage, now a snake on its Libyan sands.
ADAM AND THE WINDS
This is the posture and also the Virgilian situation of the despairing, fallen Adam whom we meet shortly later in book 10. Milton describes him, after his long soliloquy, “on the ground / Outstretched he lay, on the cold ground” (10.850–51); so Satan is first seen in the poem: “So stretched out huge in length the arch-fiend lay / Chained on the burning lake” (1.209–10). Adam’s soliloquy is preceded by the work of God’s angels changing the weather on earth. The winds are released in a full catalog, classical and modern, that is a Miltonic tour de force.
now from the north
Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore
Bursting their brazen dungeon, armed with ice
And snow and hail and stormy gust and flaw,
Boreas, and Caecias and Argestes loud
And Thrascias rend the woods and seas upturn;
With adverse blast upturns them from the south
Notus and Afer black with thunderous clouds
From Serraliona; thwart of these as fierce
Forth rush the Levant and the ponent winds
Eurus and Zephir, with their lateral noise,
Sirocco, and Libecchio, thus began
Outrage from lifeless things;
(10.695–707)
The action recalls once again the beginning of the Aeneid when, at Juno’s bidding, Aeolus looses the imprisoned winds that attack Aeneas and his fleet; four that attack the Trojan ships in Virgil’s epic—Eurus, Notus, Afer-Africus, and Zephyr (Aen. 1.85–86, 131)—are present and accounted for here. And Adam himself recalls the gale-tossed Aeneas of Aeneid 1, as the storm raging outside becomes a storm within.
these were from without
The growing miseries, which Adam saw
Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade,
To sorrow abandoned, but worse felt within,
And in a troubled sea of passion tossed,
Thus to disburden sought with sad complaint.
(10.714–19)
In a way that is typical of Milton’s method, the epic landscape becomes internalized: Satan discovered that he carried hell within him when he thinks to have escaped it by arriving on earth in book 4 (18–23, 75); Adam will receive a “paradise within thee, happier far” at the end of the epic (12.587). Here the fallen Adam is tossed on a sea of inner turmoil that, together with the winds that rage without, puts him in the position of Virgil’s Aeneas off the coast of Carthage, the same position in which Satan is first introduced in book 1, trying to find a way “From off the tossing of these fiery waves” (1.184).24 The scene returns us to the openings both of the Aeneid and of Paradise Lost itself. The latter, in hell, is the literal low point of Milton’s epic, and Adam similarly has hit rock bottom.
Milton, however, develops these parallels between the fallen Satan and the fallen Adam—and aligns them with the same Virgilian coordinates—in order finally to contrast the careers of devil and man in book 10. In a book whose narrative appears to loop back upon itself, Satan himself returns to where he started. He is an Aeneas who never really gets out of the storm or the Carthage-hell that he has himself built. In Adam’s case, the allusion to the opening of the Aeneid signals a genuine new beginning. Adam will start over, thanks to the intervention of Eve and, so the narrator, Son, and Father will each declare in book 11, thanks to prevenient grace (11.3; 11.23; 11.91). He is an Aeneas with the world all before him after the fall of Troy, and, as we shall see, he keeps his Dido-Creusa. Like Satan in the larger poem, Adam will apparently end up as we first see him in book 10 and in a similar prone posture: “prostrate” (10.1087; 10.1099) on the ground. But appearances are deceiving and the similarity that carefully unifies the fiction of the book points out the saving difference between the regenerated Adam and Eve and the forever fallen angels.
The Recovery of Human Choice
We are now, finally, in a position to read the colloquy between Adam and Eve against the preceding first seven hundred lines of book 10, with their insistent pattern of Virgilian ending collapsed with beginning, with their literal Sturm und Drang. Neither triumph, nor mock-triumph in a cycle of defeat, the respective properties of the divine and diabolic protagonists of Paradise Lost and of the martial winners and losers of earlier epic, the victory of Adam and Eve over despair is human and everyday—it is no final victory but must be won every day—and it is no less, but more heroic for that. The couple’s reconciliation with each other in marital love is the model for their reconciliation with God—the poem leaves open which causes which. Both allow them to escape the recursive pull of their own fallenness, and to find their way out of a book that seems to have no exit.
At first, in his grand, tragic “complaint” of one hundred and twenty-five verses that now follows (10.720–844), Adam cannot argue his way out of despair and concludes himself, “To Satan only like both crime and doom” (10.841). His soliloquy in fact echoes Satan’s earlier spoken soliloquies, paired by their respective addresses to the sun and to the earth, at the openings of book 4 (4.32–113) and book 9 (9.99–178). Adam crucially submits—“I submit” (10.769)—to the justice of God’s punishment where Satan had disdained the very word “submission” (4.81–86), and he thus leaves himself open to Eve’s subsequent intervention and example, “submissive in distress” (942). But Adam is no less despairing than the Satan who explicitly bid farewell to hope (4.108), and where Satan, in his resolution to embrace evil, also bid farewell to fear, Adam ends his speech driven into an “abyss of fears / And horrors” (10.842–43). Adam finds that rock bottom is itself notional, and feels himself falling ever spiritually downward, “from deep to deeper plunged” (10.844), as Satan had earlier testified in book 4—“in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide” (4.76–77)—and the poem has just depicted Satan experiencing the indeed greater mortification of falling down and crawling on his belly as a serpent. As Belial had suggested to the devils in book 2, things can get worse for them. Adam, too, repeatedly discovers the circularity of sin and of his fallen existence. The curse of his posterity whom he has made like him in original sin “Shall with a fierce reflux on me redound” (10.739; compare Satan, who deliberately seeks “others to make such / As I, though thereby worse to me redound” [9.127–28]). Adam’s “sense of endless woes” (10.754), which becomes specified as the fear that death is “endless misery” (10.810), “Comes thundering back, with dreadful revolution / On my defenseless head” (10.814–15). His “reasonings, though through mazes” return him to his own conviction: “first and last / On me, me only, as the source and spring / Of all corruption, all the blame lights due” (10.831–33). The plotting out in book 10 of returns to epic beginnings, both its three evocations of the opening of the Aeneid (Sin and Death impose stillness on Chaos; hell as Libya; the release of the winds) and the literal return of Satan to the hell of book 1, are thus internalized in the hopeless circles of Adam’s remorse. He cannot get out of his own mind by himself, and needs the partnership of Eve and/or of grace.
We have also seen this circularity in the plight of the fallen angels in Pandaemonium in book 2, whirled about in their chariot races or by whirlwinds, lost in the wandering mazes of thought, brought by revolution from hot to cold in order to suffer seasonal change. The no-exit nature of the devils’ situation depended there—as the initial exchange between Belial and Moloch spelled out—on their inability to die and the “Ages of hopeless end” (2.186) of their punishment. All other choices they make turn out to be versions of each other, and no choice at all, in light of this bad eternity. The fallen Adam, too, begins to intuit and dread an endless suffering. He overcomes his fear, “lest all I cannot die” (10.783) by reasoning out Milton’s mortalist, materialist position that the soul dies (or sleeps) with the body that it has vivified (10.783–808)—only to raise the specter that death, as it is for fallen angels, is the experience of his own remorse for an unforgiven sin: “endless misery / From this day onward, which I feel begun / Both in me, and without me, and so last / To perpetuity” (10.810–13). As he contemplates the prospect of this “second death,” the hell of the damned, Adam asks again for physical death: “Why comes not death, / Said he, with one thrice acceptable stroke / To end me?” (10.854–56). Instead, Eve approaches Adam to restore him to life: she does so not least by offering him the choice of death.
The reconciliation of the couple is exquisitely balanced so that they each in succession save the other from despair.25 After Adam lashes out at her in a general misogynistic outburst—whose literary and possibly biographical associations will be discussed in our next section—Eve begins the couple’s mutual process of spiritual recovery by four actions. The first is a physical example: she “Fell humble” (10.912) in tears and embraced Adam’s feet as a suppliant and is subsequently “upraised” (10.946) by her appeased husband. Adam is himself upraised, this time mentally and internally, from despair; after her second speech, “To better hopes his more attentive mind / Labouring had raised” (10.1011–12): he begins to work for a solution, and the curse of labor that comes with the Fall becomes a blessing. Second, Eve calls to mind the “oracle” (10.182) about the enmity between her seed and the serpent (10.925–27) expressed in the Son’s judgment on them at the beginning of the book. Third, she volunteers to return to the “place of judgment” (10.932–36). Fourth, she offers to ask God to remove his punishment from the head of Adam and to let it fall “On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, / Me me only just object of his ire” (10.935–36).
Adam appears distracted from the first three of these actions by the fourth and last. Eve’s offer to take God’s sentence upon herself is Christological and with its repetition of “me” echoes, as commentators have pointed out, the Son’s offer to die for humanity in book 3: “Behold me then, me for him, life for life / I offer, on me let thine anger fall; / Account me man” (3.236–38).26 Adam takes this option off the table, telling Eve that she is not capable of bearing the full wrath of God, and suggesting that if it would work, he would do it himself. It is not Adam’s finest moment. He refuses to Eve an ethical heroism that he himself rejected in his soliloquy where, though he recognized himself as culprit—“me, me only” he had said, now echoed by Eve—he had felt unable to bear the burden of wrath “Than all the world much heavier, though divided / With that bad woman?” (10.836–37): no question here of his taking the punishment all by himself. Moreover, he had fully considered and rejected, at the moment of God’s judgment earlier in the book, the option of shielding Eve, whose guilt “I should conceal and not expose to blame” (10.130), a moment he or the poem subsequently recalls: “To me committed and by me exposed” (10.957). The unfallen Adam passes the test of love by falling and dying with Eve; once fallen, he twice fails to die for her.27 Adam may be doctrinally correct, and the Christian plot of the poem appears to reserve the salvation of humanity for the Son, who at the beginning of book 10 has stated that “the worst on me must light, / When time shall be” (10.73–74). Eve may be trying once again, as in her setting out “to make trial of her strength” before her fall in book 9, to play a heroic role that she is not quite up to. And Adam may fear losing Eve. Again. But he is ungallant, to say the least, in attributing his own deficiency in heroism to Eve and denying her the chance to die for him.
Thwarted, Eve resolves to die, period. Rather than give birth to a posterity cursed with their original sin, she first proposes sexual abstinence and then the quickest way out.
Then both ourselves and seed at once to free
From what we fear for both, let us make short,
Let us seek death, or he not found, supply
With our own hands his office on our selves;
Why stand we longer shivering under fears,
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy.
She ended here, or vehement despair
Broke off the rest; so much of death her thoughts
Had entertained, as dyed her cheeks with pale.
(10.999-1009)
Eve invents Stoicism: Seneca writes of the many exits to life that lie open to men and women in his letters and in his tragedy, the Phoenissae.28 Her attempt to short-circuit human history through suicide is a pagan alternative to the Christological model she first proposed, but Eve still seems to usurp or parody the role of the Son. Her destroying of destruction is a counterpart to his passion, itself a kind of suicide mission, through which “Death his death’s wound shall then receive” (3.252). The difference is that the Son would overcome Death as the “second death,” a spiritual rather than a merely physical condition. Adam spells out the difference in his response to Eve when he fears that God would “make death in us live” (10.1028), as it lives in the fallen angels, who are unable to find death, that is, annihilation, in hell.
The poetic logic of this moment of Paradise Lost depends, nonetheless, on our bearing in mind the similarity between the endless, futile misery of the fallen angels and the existence of fallen human beings on earth—in order that Eve’s discovery of suicide can decisively distinguish the two. Human beings can find many ways to death; the fallen angels cannot die. (Milton does not seem interested in representing eternal punishment of human beings after death.) One may speculate to what extent John Milton, after the affliction of his blindness and the defeat of his political cause, faced suicide as a daily existential choice. The chorus of Samson Agonistes carefully addresses its hero, “Among thy slain self-killed / Not willingly” (SA 1664–65), but the play testifies to thinking about how to end it all.
For the Stoic, the possibility of suicide is the ultimate expression of human liberty. It is paradoxically no less of one in Milton’s fiction, even if suicide is to be rejected. Eve offers the wrong choice, but it now appears that human beings, unlike the devils, have a choice. In book 9, Eve unknowingly and Adam, against his better knowledge, had chosen death. Now, together, they will choose to live.29 In preserving, rather than destroying “our selves and seed,” the human race itself, they anticipate the choice proffered to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 30:19: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” In this section of the epic, Milton doubly justifies death to man, the most difficult of the ways of God to understand. At the opening of book 11, God will declare that death is the “final remedy” (11.62) to human life that would have otherwise “served but to eternize woe” (11.60) after the Fall. Human life becomes livable because we know that it will end.30 But already here in book 10, death restores the choice that seemed to be lost by the Fall: because death is available as a way out, living on becomes something we will ourselves to do, a “better fortitude.” Death becomes the ground of human freedom.
Given the choice, Adam rescues Eve from her despair as she had shaken him out of his own. He envisions a human future of “labour” (10.1054), both his and men’s work and the labor of Eve’s and women’s childbirth, both forms of creation, and by the end of the book, Adam’s laboring mind will have discovered fire like a new Prometheus.31 “To create / Is greater than created to destroy,” and the reconciliation of the couple is itself a creative act aligned with the creativity of God and contrasted to the creation-through-destruction of that other couple of book 10, Sin and Death, as they build their bridge across Chaos. Adam now takes up the cues of Eve’s first speech. He remembers the oracle of the serpent and women’s seed (10.1030–36). He repeats her plan to return to the “the place of judgment.” He imitates her tearful prostration:
What better can we do, than to the place
Repairing where he judged us, prostrate fall
Before him reverent, and there confess
Humbly our faults, and pardon beg, with tears
Watering the ground, and with our sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
(10.1086–92)
Adam disconcertingly presents these actions as if they were his own ideas—but in some ways they are. He appears to realize for the first time that the serpent was, in fact, Satan (10.1033–35); he urges that they pray not to take all the punishment onto one or the other of themselves but to seek forgiveness together. Milton delicately insists on the mutuality of the first couple’s finding their course to spiritual renewal: it belongs to both of them, the product of the give-and-take that characterizes his ideal of marriage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: “a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage” (CPW 2:246). Whatever they accomplish, they accomplish together. The spectacular triple pun of “Repairing”—the primary sense is “returning,” but it also connotes “putting a pair or couple together again” and “making reparation”—suggests that the reconciliation of Adam and Eve, particularly Adam’s relenting forgiveness to the penitent Eve, who fell humble at his feet (“at his feet submissive in distress, / Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking” [10.942–43]), is the condition, as well as the model, for their reconciliation with God: “let him live / Before thee reconciled” (11.38–39), says the Son, carrying their prayers to the Father as their advocate and interpreter. The resolution that the couple “prostrate fall” before the offended deity transforms Adam’s earlier lying in despair, outstretched upon the cold ground, into a posture now of penitence and prayer.32 The contrast with the fall of Satan and his cohorts prone on the ground, as serpents in enforced “penance,” indicates that one will either prostrate oneself to God willingly or God will make one bow down to him willing or no. Adam and Eve prostrate themselves in order to rise, while the fallen angels fall down only to fall further, over and over. One is surprised, on turning the page to the first verse of book 11, to find the human couple in a different stance: “Thus they in lowliest plight repentant stood”; they may have gotten up, but the verb certainly refers to their spiritual state.
Milton remarkably repeats Adam’s injunction to prostration and prayer, altered into narrative form, to end book 10 (10.1098–1104); the Homeric-style repetition contributes to the sense of both formal and symbolic closure, the sense that Paradise Lost has reached its heroic climax, which is nothing more, but also nothing less, than the restoration of the marriage of Adam and Eve.33 Quieter, as Tillyard pointed out, than the mock-triumph of Satan to which it is contrasted inside the book or than the heroic triumphs of the Son at the ends of books 6 and 7, it does not correspond to the Virgilian coordinates of beginning and ending discussed in the preceding section. Adam and Eve escape the circular return to spiritual storm and shipwreck that claims Satan;34 they do not achieve the apocalyptic finality of the triumphant Son. By contrast, the peace Adam and Eve have achieved is provisional and open-ended: “My motions in him, longer than they move, / His heart I know, how variable and vain / Self-left” (11.91–93) comments God in the following book 11, as he unpleasantly takes credit for the human drama we have just watched unfold. The subsequent history of mankind narrated by Michael in books 11 and 12 will recount a depressing series of relapses. But the reconciliation of Adam and Eve ensures that there will be a human history at all, a history into which they enter at the close of Paradise Lost with wandering steps and slow, their thoughts, Michael tells them, to be cheered by a “happy end” (12.605) not soon or anywhere in sight. They leave Eden to go in medias res, so to speak, into history’s middle and its human muddle, which may have to be enough for them, as well as for Milton’s readers. It will be up to them “to choose / Their place of rest” (12.646–47): the idea returns, in these final lines summing up the poem, that death haunts human choice as both its limit and condition of freedom.35 Like the deity they worship anew, Adam and Eve have chosen creation over destruction; following the instructions Raphael gave them when they were immortal (8.633), they resolve, now in the face of death, to live happy and love.
Cherishing Eve
The careful balancing of the back-and-forth efforts of Adam and Eve to achieve a new start for their marriage and for human life—one lifting the other, in turn, from despondency and despair—corresponds to the larger balancing of our sympathies toward the two characters that are made to shift between book 9 and book 10. To put it schematically, Eve acts badly toward Adam, Adam acts nobly toward her in book 9; Adam acts badly toward Eve, Eve acts nobly toward him in book 10. The bad actions in question are not their respective falls, but how Eve and Adam behave after they have fallen. Even the most sympathetic reader of Eve must be taken aback when in book 9, as she contemplates her own death and “Adam wedded to another Eve” (9.828), she decides to take her husband with her: “Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe” (9.831). Marriage for better or for worse: Eve’s plan, little short of murderous, is a measure of her fallenness. Nevertheless, through the cunning of Milton’s plotting and art, Eve hardly needs to put her plan into effect and play the role of a Circean or Duessa-like seductress, for Adam resolves to fall beside her “soon as he heard / The fatal trespass done by Eve” (9.888–89).36 He cannot live without her, and his love is enough to ensure that they will fall and stay together. He eats the forbidden fruit, the narrator informs us, “Against his better knowledge, not deceived / But fondly overcome with female charm” (9.998–99). However one understands the second of these verses, Eve has not seduced Adam as she was seduced by Satan, and Adam scarcely seems to be listening to her arguments as he asserts to himself in inward, silent soliloquy: “Certain my resolution is to die” (9.907). But it is not for want of Eve’s trying, and this gap between her criminal intent and action and Adam’s quite independent response and responsibility for his fall allows us to see her as both more and less guilty. Eve, in fact, feels guilty, and in the shift between the behavior of the two characters between books 9 and 10, she is the member of the couple who confesses soon to the Son who has come in judgment over them (10.160) at the beginning of book 10, and who subsequently inaugurates the reconciliation with Adam, acknowledging that she has sinned “against God and thee” (10.931). In book 10, it is Adam’s turn, and he is a cad. In a measure of his fallenness, he first attempts to lay the blame on Eve to the judging Son (10.125–43). Later, he rejects Eve when she approaches him, and he launches an invective against both her and womankind: “Out of my sight, thou serpent” (10.867). Eve perseveres and the couple “repair” in book 10—this time in true unity and repentance—as they had partnered in sin in book 9.
Paradise Lost makes available a reading of Eve as an epic femme fatale, if only, through an ironic twist of plot, to complicate such a conventional understanding of its action and of Eve herself. It is part of the work of book 10 to undo the aspersions that both Adam and the poem cast upon his wife. William Kerrigan comments, “As the theodicy gradually succeeds in establishing God’s innocence of responsibility for the fall, Eve in particular stands accused, and the last three books of the poem seek to make peace with the ambivalent gift of life and death she bequeaths to her children. Ultimately Eve is to be cherished and celebrated.”37 Kerrigan relates the poem’s ambivalence to Milton’s own experience of his three marriages.
Book 10 contributes to this revaluation of Eve through a series of literary allusions—to Virgil’s Dido and Tasso’s Armida, to the myth of Pandora, and to the concubine exposed at Gibeah in Judges 19—that both link up to other passages in Paradise Lost and suggest a shared pattern within the book itself. As I identify and examine the latter two cases, I will, like Kerrigan, attempt to show how they may be intertwined with Milton’s biography. Such biographical links are necessarily tentative and speculative: that they are inferred through buried literary allusions may indicate something of their personal, private nature. All three allusions are revisionary: they overturn misogynistic precedents and teach the reader, as well as Adam, to celebrate Eve.
DIDO AND ARMIDA; CREUSA
The reconciliation of Adam and Eve evokes, if only to invert, one further Virgilian coordinate, and turn the moment into a specifically epic choice. In Eve’s counsel of suicide, thoughts of death have “dyed her cheeks with pale” (10.1009). The line is a direct allusion to Tasso’s heroine Armida in the last canto of the Gerusalemme liberata: “già tinta in viso di pallor di morte” (GL 20.127.6; her face already dyed with the pallor of death). Torn by the passions of Love and Disdain for Rinaldo, the hero and former lover who has earlier abandoned her after their erotic idyll together on her Eden-like island paradise in the Fortunate Isles, the pagan Armida prepares, in the aftermath of the final battle and Crusader victory outside of Jerusalem, to take her life with an arrow, a literal weapon symbolically charged as an arrow of love. She cites Seneca’s Phoenissae (GL 20.132) on suicide. Rinaldo saves her at the last minute and the couple reach an ambiguous reconciliation.38
And behind Tasso’s Armida lies Virgil’s Dido, abandoned by Aeneas, whom Rome’s destiny has called away from his love for her. At the moment Dido rushes to kill herself in book 4 of the Aeneid, she wears the pallor of her approaching death—“pallida morte futura” (Aen. 4:644). So Virgil portrays the historical figure for whom Dido is in part a fictional stand-in, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra—“pallentem morte futura” (8.709)—as she flees from defeat at Actium toward her own suicide by the Nile, on the reliefs sculpted on the shield of Aeneas in book 8. The telltale pallor of Milton’s Eve is overdetermined. Tasso makes Armida a combination of Virgil’s Dido and Cleopatra, but he is primarily interested in casting her as a Dido whom his poem will not allow to destroy herself. That suicidal Dido is pointedly reserved for the demonic parodists of the enchanted woods of canto 18 who produce before Rinaldo a specter of Armida among myrtle trees (GL 18.25–37) that evoke the Lugentes campi, the Mournful Fields of Virgil’s underworld where Aeneas sees the ghost of Dido flee away from him (Aen. 6.440–76). Earlier in the poem in canto 13, the same woods had taken on the appearance of another underworld explicitly linked to suicide, Dante’s forest of suicides in Inferno 13.
Milton pursues similar ends when he portrays the pale-cheeked Eve taking up the role of Armida and, through Armida, of Dido. Her first words in the colloquy, “Forsake me not thus, Adam” (10.914) not only align her with Jesus suffering on the cross (Matt. 27:46), but with Dido and other abandoned epic heroines. Ovid’s version of Dido in the Heroides, whose imagining of Aeneas in a new homeland with another Dido—“altera Dido” (Heroides 7.17)—may lie behind both Eve’s and Adam’s speculations on “another Eve” (9.828; 9.911) in book 9, also suggests that Aeneas may be forsaking a pregnant Dido (Heroides 7.133); her ensuing self-immolation will take his posterity with her, much as Eve’s proposed suicide aims to do.39 Tasso has Rinaldo abandon Armida in a full-scale reenactment of Aeneas leaving Dido (GL 16.29–74), and he waits until the final stanzas of the Gerusalemme liberata to bring them back together. Adam’s speechless astonishment—“Astonied stood and blank” (9.890)—on seeing the fallen Eve return to him with the forbidden fruit (9.890–94) recalled the reaction of Aeneas in Aeneid 4 when Mercury orders him to depart from Dido and Carthage (Aen. 4.278–80). But Adam chose not to pick up the Virgilian cue and he fell with Eve rather than abandon her.40 In fact, Milton has served notice from the very beginning of the relationship of the first husband and wife that Paradise Lost would be an epic that will save its Dido-like heroine and the sexual love that Virgil’s hero Aeneas had to give up. When Adam now dissuades Eve from the fate of Dido in book 10, he evokes his very first interaction with her, the first words that Eve, recalling the scene of her creation in book 4, remembers Adam crying to her as she turned back to her watery image in the pool: “Whom fly’st thou? Whom thou fly’st, of him thou art” (4.482), he called out before he took her hand in wedlock. “Quem fugis?” are the last words Aeneas addresses to the ghost of the self-slain Dido (Aen. 6.466), who tears herself away from him into the shadowy grove of the Lugentes campi and out of the Aeneid.41 Milton had carefully inverted his Virgilian model in book 4 to indicate that Eve’s narcissism was a kind of suicide, and there, too, it might have spelled the end of the human race. Now he suggests that Adam’s talking Eve out of a Dido-like suicide returns to the couple’s first meeting and starts their marriage over again.
Milton, following Tasso, rejects the tragic scenario of the Aeneid that depicts the incompatibility of private, erotic experience, identified through Dido with womankind, with the public, masculine, heroic mission of epic. The domestic sphere of married love becomes the central heroic arena of Paradise Lost, and the stakes in Adam and Eve’s relationship are higher than in the Christian/pagan (Muslim) reconciliation of Tasso’s Rinaldo and Armida: the reunion of the first couple ensures the future of humanity, and, more emphatically than Tasso’s fiction, it asserts the value of the sexual life. Eve offers sexual abstinence as an alternative option to suicide, but the two are the same if humans are to increase and multiply—“Our maker bids increase, who bids abstain / But our destroyer?” (4.748–49), the narrator has earlier asked, defending the depiction of sexual intercourse in Eden against theologians he dismisses as hypocrites. Adam rejects both of Eve’s options in his reclaiming their marriage. He is also reclaiming in Eve the dignity of woman as the vessel of human reproduction—“Hail mother of mankind” (5.388), Raphael had addressed her before the Fall—against a tradition of misogyny to which the Aeneid had offered the most prestigious literary contribution. The blocking divine antagonist of the hero in Virgil’s epic is pronuba Juno (Aen. 4.166), the very goddess who furthers marriage and family: Dido’s suicide by the sword Aeneas has left behind is a grotesque sexual act, the prolonged agonies by which her soul seeks to leave her body a ghastly version of childbirth.42 Adam’s rescue of Eve overturns this Virgilian model and its portrait of the feminine.43 This Aeneas comes around and cherishes his Dido.
Outside of book 10, Milton will again counter Virgil’s relegation of the feminine and of sexual love when he returns to the model of the Aeneid at the close of Paradise Lost. God’s sending Michael to inform Adam that he and Eve must leave Eden and its comforts repeats the descent of Mercury in Aeneid 4 to bid Aeneas to leave Dido’s Carthage. Milton signals the analogy, as well as the difference, in the two fictions by dressing up Michael in Aeneas’s clothes.44 The archangel wears “A military vest of purple … / Livelier than Meliboean, or the grain / Of Sarra” (11.241–43), while his sword hangs by his side “As in a glistering zodiac” (11.247): an unmistakable recollection of the starry sword and of the mantle shining with the purple of Tyre (Sarra)—“atque illi stellatus iaspide fulua / ensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laena” (Aen. 4.261–62)—the gifts of Dido that Aeneas is wearing when Mercury appears to him.45 The reversal of who is wearing what signals yet once more that in Paradise Lost the military heroism of the classical epic hero has been transferred away from the human to the combatants of the War in Heaven: it is not a proper heroic option for Adam or for his descendants. But it also suggests that this version of leaving Carthage will be different. In the final lines of the poem, as Adam and Eve look back together in book 12 on Eden, over which the “flaming brand” of the sword of God is blazing, and see its gate thronged with “fiery arms” (12.643–44), they recall not only Lot and his wife leaving burning Sodom, but also the Aeneas of Aeneid 5 looking back—“respiciens”—from the sea on the walls of Carthage lit by the flames of Dido’s funeral pyre (Aen. 5.1–7).46 (The comparison of the heat and vapor of the sword of God to “the Libyan air adust” [12.635] reinforces the parallel.) But Adam does not abandon his Dido: Eve leaves Eden beside him.
Dido is not the first beloved woman, nor Carthage the first city in flames, that Aeneas’s historical mission causes him to leave behind in Virgil’s epic. Carthage was itself the last of a whole series of substitutes in books 1–4 of the Aeneid for the Troy he has lost, Dido a possible second spouse. As Troy is set ablaze in book 2, Aeneas famously lifts up and carries his father Anchises on his shoulders while he takes his little son Iulus by the hand—an image of patriarchal piety and continuity, particularly of the Julian lineage of Augustus—while his beloved wife Creusa follows behind him. But in a moment of panic created by Anchises, Aeneas loses Creusa as he is leaving his smoldering city, and when he returns to find her inside Troy, he encounters her ghost, who tells him he must go to Italy without her (Aen. 2.701–95): here, too, Aeneas is rendered speechless (Aen. 2.774). Milton pointedly makes a different choice for his hero. In the final words spoken in the poem, Eve tells Adam in book 12 that she is ready to leave Eden, over which she and Adam will see the flaming brand of God’s sword.
but now lead on;
In me is no delay; with thee to go,
Is to stay here; …
(12.614–16)
She echoes the words of Virgil’s Anchises: “iam iam nulla mora est; sequor et qua ducitis adsum” (Aen. 2.701; Now, now there is no delay; I follow and where you lead, there I am). The omen of the Julian destiny that will produce Augustus moves Anchises to leave Troy, and Eve, too, has the consolation that “By me the promised seed shall all restore” (12.623), the expected Christ. But the larger import of the allusion puts Eve, wife and partner, in the future of humanity in place of the Virgilian father and son: she is no Creusa to be left behind.47 Nor, in the evocation of the destruction of Sodom a few lines later (12.636–44), will Eve suffer the analogous fate of Lot’s wife: she and Adam both look back on the Eden they have lost, now seemingly ablaze with angelic arms; they shed a few tears and move on. Like all future husbands in the marriage that he institutes, Adam leaves his father and cleaves unto his wife—“so that marriage requireth a greater duetie of us toward our wives, then otherwise we are bounde to shewe to our parents,” the Geneva Bible comments on Genesis 2:23; in Paradise Lost the moral seems to apply even to one’s divine parent. No father on his back, Adam leaves Eden with Eve hand in hand.
PANDORA
It is difficult to read the scene of Eve’s falling at the feet of Adam and seeking his forgiveness and not connect it to the account that Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips gives of the drama of the poet’s first marriage to Mary Powell.48 After only one month of wedded life with the poet, this daughter of a royalist family had returned to her father’s house in Oxfordshire in 1642. Milton sent for her by letter and then messenger, who, Phillips writes, “reported that he was dismissed with some sort of contempt.”49 Milton had been abandoned. Incensed, he wrote his divorce tracts, frequented as “a single man again” the company of the married Margaret Lee, and began a “design” to marry one of the daughters of a Dr. Davis, who was “a very handsome and witty gentlewoman, but averse, as it is said, to this motion.”50 In 1645, the Powells saw the king’s cause and their own circumstances in decline, and sought to renew the alliance; friends of each party brought Milton and Mary Powell together in the house of one of his relatives.
One time above the rest, he making his usual visit, the wife was ready in the next room, and on a sudden he was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him. He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion and firm league of peace for the future.51
Eve’s submission to Adam and his relenting in Paradise Lost appear to rewrite this scene of Milton’s biography, although we cannot know to what extent Phillips’s narrative, penned in 1694, has been influenced, even inspired, by the poem. Milton’s initial “show of aversion and rejection” on that occasion becomes something more heated and complicated in Adam’s outburst against his wife, one of the main bases, Edward Le Comte points out, for “Milton’s reputation as a misogynist poet.”52
Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With man as angels without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befall, innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares,
And straight conjunction with this sex: for either
He never shall find out fit mate, but such
As some misfortune brings him, or mistake,
Or whom he wishes most shall seldom gain
Through her perverseness, but shall see her gained
By a far worse, or if she love, withheld
By parents, or his happiest choice too late
Shall meet, already linked and wedlock-bound
To a fell adversary, his hate or shame:
Which infinite calamity shall cause
To human life, and household peace confound.
(10.888–908)
In this blanket rejection of the female sex, Adam echoes the personal griefs of his poet-creator as he lists the possible alternatives of the mating game: the mistake in Mary Powell, perverseness in the averse Ms. Davis, the already-married Margaret Lee. Milton evokes here his own “lot unfortunate in nuptial choice” (SA 1743), as Manoa, the father of the hero in the unmistakably autobiographical Samson Agonistes, remarks on his son.53 But Milton could both give voice to felt wrongs and discontents and look back at them with a sense of distance and, perhaps, even of self-criticism. Consider the source of this speech: he puts these complaints in the mouth of an Adam in despair and at his lowest moral point in the poem, ready to blame Eve, women, and anyone else for the misery that he has less than fifty verses earlier admitted falls due “first and last / On me, me only” (10.831–32). He both recognizes and cannot bear his own guilt: male self-hatred, Milton suggests, lies at the basis of the hatred of women. Adam’s excessive and almost comically sputtering tone contributes to the distancing effect: it is misogyny placed within quotation marks.54
One should also consider the literary source(s). As with his recall of Tasso’s Armida and Virgil’s Dido, Milton makes a double allusion. It has been recognized that Adam’s rant is a citation of a speech by the hero of Euripides’s Hippolytus (616–37), delivered at the moment when Hippolytus has been shocked by the sexual proposition made to him by the Nurse on behalf of her mistress, his stepmother Phaedra. Adam takes up the question that Hippolytus addresses to Zeus about why there could not have been some means other than women to propagate the human race, and he additionally cites the case of the angels in heaven as an all-male fellowship, something like the Cambridge in the sky, the “sweet societies,” that the speaker of Lycidas envisions for the dead swain; he does not appear to know, and the poem itself seems to have forgotten, what it has told us back in book 1, that angelic spirits—or is it only the fallen spirits?—are versatile and “when they please / Can either sex assume, or both” (1.423–24). But Hippolytus, even before he is propositioned to commit incest, was already a woman hater, an exemplar of what Cicero defines as a pathological condition (Tusculan Disputations 4.11.27). Caspar Stiblin, an influential Renaissance commentator on Euripides, cautions the reader not to confuse the misogynistic attitudes of an enraged character with that of his author, and notes the over-the-top quality of Hippolytus’s speech: “The calumny against women is vehement; but it is very well suited to Hippolytus, who naturally pursued women with hatred because of his perpetual vow of virginity.”55 As Aphrodite complains at the beginning of Euripides’s play (14), Hippolytus had dedicated himself to virginal chastity. So had the young Milton, the poet of Lycidas, as well as of Comus and other poems of the 1645 volume, a man, we might presume, still a virgin at thirty-four on his wedding three years earlier to Mary Powell—the marriage that initially did not turn out well. Adam has regressed to attitudes that he never shared—he knew from the moment of his creation that it was not good for man to be alone—but that did belong to an earlier period of his poet-creator’s biography. By casting Adam and his former self as another Hippolytus, Milton lends a measure of self-awareness—an acknowledgment that he, too, may have been part of the problem—to this restaging of his marital crisis with its invective against womankind.
The speech of Euripides’s Hippolytus offers a model for the “either” and the succession of “or’s” of Adam’s listing of the alternatives, one as bad as the next, that women will offer to the men who court them in the future: either one gets good in-laws and a bad wife, Hippolytus says, or a good wife and in-laws who make one miserable (634–37). The Euripidean passage, in turn, alludes to an earlier Greek classic, the description of the original creation of women in the form of the maleficent Pandora in Hesiod’s Theogony (570–616): women are an evil to men, “anthropois kakòn” for Hippolytus (616); “andressi kakòn” (606) in Hesiod’s poem.56 Hesiod also spells out a set of undesirable alternatives or mixed blessings that await future men that are perhaps closer than the Euripides passage to Adam’s prophetic tone and to Milton’s experience: either you reach old age without support (something for a blind man to think about) or you suffer a mixture of good and evil in marriage (Theogony 603–12). Women: you can’t live with them or without them. One might not emphasize the double allusion that Milton is making here, to the Hesiodic text inside the Euripidean one, were it not for the poem’s earlier identification of Eve with Pandora in book 4 and, more pointedly, for the way in which the action of book 10 is framed first by Adam’s complaining to the Son about the “gift” of his wife and last by his invention of fire in the manner of Prometheus, a sequence that seems to reverse and revise that identification.
The likening of Eve to the mythical Pandora, the first woman whom Zeus caused to be molded out of earth by the metalworking God Hephaestus, was traditional. In Hesiod’s second telling of the story, which names Pandora, in the Works and the Days (42–104), her jar or box brought misfortunes to mankind, just as Eve brought the forbidden fruit to Adam.57 Woman, according to both Hesiodic versions, was a punishment or evening of the score that Zeus wrought on humanity for the crime of Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, who had stolen the fire of Zeus and given it to mankind. Milton’s comparison of Eve to Pandora in book 4 follows the usual conflation, and misogynistic bent, of the biblical and classical stories.
more adorned,
More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods
Endowed with all their gifts, and O too like
In sad event, when to the unwiser son
Of Japhet brought by Hermes, she ensnared
Mankind with her fair looks, to be avenged
On him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire.
(4.713–19)
In the Works and the Days, the gods contribute gifts to Pandora—hence her name, “All-Gift”—and then Zeus bestows her on Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, as a countergift for Prometheus’s gift of fire. Prometheus had warned his unwiser brother not to accept presents from Zeus, but to no avail. Adam describes Eve as just such a fatal gift in the Judgment Scene at the beginning of book 10 when he tries to shift the blame to “This woman whom thou madest to be my help, / And gavest me as thy perfect gift, so good / … Her doing seemed to justify the deed” (10.137–38, 142). The sarcasm transforms Adam’s earlier praise of his wife, “Heaven’s last best gift” (5.19), “fairest this / Of all thy gifts” (8.493–94). Now he complains, in an evident rewriting of the events, that he was taken in by appearances and that God’s gift has turned out to be a Pandora. The Son’s reply denies this charge, but at the same time picks up the same language as the book 4 simile: “adorned / She was indeed, and lovely to attract / Thy love, not thy subjection, and her gifts / Were such as under government well seemed” (10.151–54). Pandora’s looks, the simile had declared, “ensnared” mankind: in his tirade against Eve and women more generally, Adam would warn all creatures away, “lest that too heavenly form, pretended / To hellish falsehood, snare them” (10.872–73), and he insists on the term, condemning the “female snares” (10.897) that will confound men in the future. Eve herself penitently acknowledges to Adam that she, “for thee ordained / A help, became thy snare” (11.164–65), and the word, with its associations, like Pandora’s box, with the female pudenda, comes back in full force and exuding sexual disgust in Samson’s recriminations of his marriage to Dalila in Samson Agonistes: “into the snare I fell / Of fair fallacious looks” (SA 532–33; cf. 230, 365, 409, 845, 860, 931).58 Women and sexuality prove to be man’s downfall and Adam can still speak in this vein in book 11, where he invents the hoarily conventional pun—“the tenor of man’s woe / Holds on the same, from woman to begin” (11.632–33)—before he is corrected, if not completely contradicted, by Michael, who tells him and future men to look for the woman within: “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins” (11.634).
Yet already in book 4, Milton distances himself from the likeness he draws between Eve and Pandora—“O too like.” By following Renaissance mythographers who identified the Greek Japet with Japhet, Noah’s son,59 he underscores the lack of correspondence between the classical myth and his own true scriptural story of Adam and Eve on the other side of the Flood.60 Moreover, the likeness confuses causality. The Pandora-Eve of the simile seems to occasion the crime for which she is the instrument of divine punishment, if we are to understand the stealing of fire by Prometheus as a figure for original sin. Milton had earlier read the Prometheus story in just such terms in his second Latin prolusion at Cambridge, “On the Harmony of the Spheres”: “The fact that we are unable to hear this harmony seems to be due to the presumption of that thief Prometheus, which brought so many evils upon men, and robbed us of that happiness which we may never again enjoy so long as we remain buried in sin [sceleribus cooperti] and degraded by brutish desires” (CPW 1.238–39, Works 12:156–57). The Pandora simile, that is, seems to share much of the misogyny of the Adam who lashes out at Eve after the Fall in book 10 and whose outburst against women alludes again to Pandora, the Adam who blames his wife and who sees nothing but trouble—“innumerable / Disturbances”—from women thenceforth.
Adam’s resolution in the final verses of book 10, just before he takes up Eve’s earlier advice and urges them both to return to the place of their judgment and offer up prayer to God, answers to and corrects these earlier evocations of Pandora. Remembering how the pitying Son had clothed them after his judgment upon them, and facing the changes in weather that God is bringing on after their Fall, Adam begins, in a pointedly drawn-out meditation, to find a way to keep themselves warm. Before the sun goes down they should seek
how we his gathered beams
Reflected, may with matter sere foment,
Or by collision of two bodies grind
The air attrite to fire, as late the clouds
Justling or pushed with winds rude in their shock
Tine the slant lightning, whose thwart flame driven down
Kindles the gummy bark of fir or pine,
And sends a comfortable heat from far,
Which might supply the sun; such fire to use,
And what may else be remedy or cure
To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought,
He will instruct us praying, and of grace
Beseeching him …
(10.1070–82)
Adam himself becomes a Prometheus, discovering fire. The passage balances, on the one hand, human invention and action, the grinding of bodies, with, on the other, dependence on the fires of heaven, on lightning, and on the very sun that the possession of fire will “supply” or replace, dependence ultimately on divine instruction that will supply in turn what human beings have lost.61 Milton creates an area of autonomous human action—and those generative grinding bodies are also sexualized62—that will build a technological future at the same time that he insists on divine cooperation: these are “My motions in him” (11.91), God announces at the opening of book 11.
The purely secular, and therefore sinful version of such technological advances through fire are the metalworking children of Cain subsequently revealed in a vision by Michael to Adam in the following book (11.558–92), “inventors rare” who, in pointed contrast to Adam, refuse to acknowledge the gifts of the Spirit who taught them their “arts that polish life” (11.610). “Yet they a beauteous offspring shall beget” (11.613), Michael says of these first artisans, and a momentary quibble makes us think that he is referring to their handiworks before the next verse reveals their attractive daughters, themselves works of art, so many Pandoras “that seemed / Of goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay, / Yet empty of all good wherein consists / Woman’s domestic honour and chief praise” (11.614–16), who snare the righteous “sons of God” (11.622) of Genesis 6:1 in “the amorous net” (11.586). They are the ones whom Adam terms man’s woe. “Ill-mated marriages” (11.684) will, indeed, lead to human misery and sin, Michael says (and thereby justifies Milton’s writings on divorce). Milton seems to be redistributing the motifs of the Prometheus-Pandora story in this later episode of fallen human history, playing on a Renaissance mythographical identification of Pandora’s maker Vulcan/Hephaestus with Tubalcain, the blacksmith descendant of Cain (Genesis 4:22).63 But here in book 10 Adam is an innocent Prometheus, and the Prometheus story itself no longer stands in for the original sin of the Fall: the discovery of fire is instead part of a “remedy or cure” for the effects of the Fall.
This Prometheus, moreover, reverses the order of events in the Pandora myth and, in effect, undoes its meaning. Adam invents fire at the end of book 10, after he has received the “perfect gift” of the first woman about whom he complains at the Judgment Scene at the book’s beginning, after his invective against Eve and womankind has evoked Hesiod’s Pandora. Milton runs the tale of Pandora backward so that the first woman is already on the scene when the invention of fire takes place, and cannot be its subsequent punishment. This reversal dissociates the Pandora myth from Milton’s own biblical story that it had seemed all “too like”: it corrects both the simile in book 4 and Adam’s framing of his story in the misogynistic terms of the myth. The fallen Adam of book 10 gives voice to the idea that Eve, women, women’s beauty, and human sexual experience itself are some kind of divine mistake that has caused the Fall or a divine retribution that punishes it in the future—but he has moved beyond this idea by the book’s end. Eve is put under accusation, but acquitted as well as forgiven: she is not Pandora.64
THE EXPOSED MATRON
In the 1674 second version of Paradise Lost, Milton changed the wording of the two verses in book 1 that complete the description of Belial, the lewd demon, a passage given prominence by its coming at the very end of the catalog of the chief devils who will come to inhabit the Holy Land of the Bible in future times. Belial had been present in spirit in the Sodom of Genesis 19, when the townsmen of the city that was soon to be destroyed demanded that Lot send out his two angelic guests so that they might sexually abuse them, present as well in the biblical rewriting of the Sodom episode in Judges 19, the account of the Levite and his concubine in Gibeah. Milton’s mention of this latter story reads as follows in the 1667 Paradise Lost:
and that night
In Gibeah, when hospitable Dores
Yielded thir Matrons to prevent worse rape
(1.503–5)
The version of 1674 makes these changes:
and that night
In Gibeah, when the hospitable door
Exposed a matron to avoid worse rape.
(1.503–5)
The revision follows the scriptural story more exactly.65 When the Benjamite inhabitants of Gibeah, “certain sons of Belial,” demand that the Levite be sent out so that they “may know him,” his Ephraimite host, also a stranger in the city, offers to send out his maiden daughter and the Levite’s concubine: plural victims. In the event, however, it is the Levite husband and not the hospitable Ephraimite who takes his concubine and brings her out to them. The woman is gang-raped and turns up fallen on the threshold of the house the next morning (Judges 19:22–27). The Geneva Bible commentary pronounces her dead, though the text is unclear.66 One can only hope so, for in the still more horrifying continuation of the story, the Levite puts her body over his donkey, carries it to his house, cuts it up, dead or alive, into twelve pieces, sends them throughout Israel as an emblem of the crime committed against the community of tribes, and thereby instigates a war of near extermination against the Benjamites.
What also catches the eye in this revision is the change of the verbs, “Exposed” in place of “Yielded,” which now suggests less a helpless surrender to the crowd outside than the Levite’s active exercise of his power over the concubine. Similarly, the substitution of “avoid” for “prevent” seems to lessen the urgency of the husband’s choice, to make it more of a deliberate choice. There is a secret wit in the coupling of “Exposed” and “avoid,” which can be near synonyms meaning “to expel” or “to banish.” But Milton’s change of the wording to “Exposed” is calculated, above all, to link this passage to the drama of book 10 and to Adam, the first human husband who chooses “to expose” his wife (10.130) and later admits to having done so: “To me committed and by me exposed” (10.957).
The link suggests another autobiographical layer in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve’s marriage in Eden. The Gibeah story, as Louise Simons and Michael Lieb have shown, haunted Milton’s imagination and dots his prose works throughout his career; it was one of the scenarios—the destruction of Sodom was another—in the list that Milton compiled of possible subjects on which to write a tragedy (CPW 8:556).67 His most significant discussion of the Judges episode, however, lies in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where Milton’s personal experience frequently seeps into the argument. There was a parallel, in fact, between Mary Powell and the Levite’s concubine in the story. Both had left their husbands and returned to their father’s house, and it is on his return from retrieving the concubine that the Levite stops for the night in Gibeah: “when Milton read Judges,” Simons writes, “he may have pictured Mary Powell as the headstrong wife and himself as the long-suffering husband.”68
Milton brings up the Judges passage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in order to practice a bit of philological legerdemain. He does not argue that the phrase in the English version, “And his concubine played the whore against him [the Levite]” (Judges 19:2), is a mistranslation, as he would have known it was, but that it should be understood to mean only that she was stubborn and rebellious: “Fornication then in this place of Judges is understood for stubborn disobedience against the husband, and not for adultery” (CPW 2:336).69 The point not only serves Milton’s purpose to prove that the fornication for which scripture allows the husband to seek divorce can extend to temperamental differences that can make a marriage untenable. It also absolves Mary Powell of anything worse than leaving John Milton and refusing to come back to him: humiliating enough, perhaps, for the author of the divorce tracts. Additionally, it challenges commentators who complacently concluded that the whoring concubine had gotten what was coming to her during the night in Gibeah.70 It refocuses attention on the husband who sacrifices her to save himself from violation, and by the time of the epic, Milton appears to feel some discomfort with his identification with the Levite. Was he, as Lieb suggests, expressing an unacknowledged, avoided bisexuality that complicated his marriage?71 Had Milton done nothing else, he had exposed Mary Powell multiple times in print as the wife of the man seeking divorce. The link between the Gibeah story and the epic’s main story of the Fall had been implicit in 1667; the 1674 substitution of “exposed” for “yielded” now created an explicit verbal link and suggested that both Adam and Milton—like the Levite—may have done their first wives wrong.
The appearances of the verb “expose” in book 10 have been mentioned above. To examine its resonance further, let us return to Adam’s answer to the judging Son, who asks him if he has eaten of the tree of the forbidden fruit. Adam elaborates the plainer answer of the Adam of Genesis 3:12, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat,” with its hint that God may have been to blame in creating woman, into a complaint about God’s “perfect gift” that turns Eve, as we have seen, into a kind of Pandora.72 But before Adam does so, Milton provides for him a long speech of apparent soul-searching that expands the scriptural passage.
To whom thus Adam sore beset replied.
O heaven! In evil strait this day I stand
Before my judge, either to undergo
My self the total crime, or to accuse
My other self, the partner of my life;
Whose failing, while her faith to me remains,
I should conceal, and not expose to blame
By my complaint: but strict necessity
Subdues me, and calamitous constraint
Lest on my head both sin and punishment,
However insupportable, be all
Devolved; though should I hold my peace, yet thou
Wouldst easily detect what I conceal.
(10.124–36)
Adam’s words have the sound of a soliloquy, but they are in fact spoken out loud as a performance of self-division, perhaps sincere but certainly for the benefit of his judge. In this forensic setting, Adam has recourse to the law court’s oratorical trick of praeteritio, declaring what he will or should conceal, and in doing so, not concealing it at all. In any event, he concludes at the end, God would see through his ploy, so he might as well be honest. He invokes “necessity, / The tyrant’s plea” (4.393–94), as Milton’s narrator had called it in book 4 with reference to Satan’s supposed reluctance to make victims of mankind in order to pursue his imperial ambitions and revenge on God: the claim that one has no choice but to pursue self-serving actions that do harm to others. And so, acting against his better knowledge once again, Adam accuses Eve and exposes her to blame, lest he have to take all the punishment—and perhaps with the hope that all the punishment will fall on her. He exposes this matron, as it were, to avoid a worse rap.
In the scene of their reconciliation later in the book, Adam looks back on his behavior, and seems to acknowledge, perhaps grudgingly, that he has been at some fault. If he thought it would work, he says, in response to Eve’s suggestion that she pray to God so that all of the punishment for the Fall might indeed fall upon her rather than on him, he would do the same for her:
That on my head all might be visited,
Thy frailty and infirmer sex forgiven,
To me committed and by me exposed.
(10.955–57)
Adam now confesses to having exposed his wife, and the verb is given emphasis by the full stop at the end of the line and of the verse sentence, by its juxtaposition within the balanced line to what seems to be its antonym, “committed.” He may refer in retrospect not only to his evasion before the Son’s judgment but to his fatally having allowed Eve to go off by herself in book 9, leaving her open to Satan’s temptation: she returned to him, in Adam’s own words, “deflowered” (9.901). He exposed Eve in spite of his sententious assertion of the duties of husband to wife, “Who guards her, or with her the worst endures” (9.269). In their apparently endless mutual recrimination at the end of the book, Eve upbraids Adam for not having commanded her “absolutely not to go” (9.1156), for not being “firm and fixed in thy dissent” (9.1160): he had failed, she implies, to play the role of the man, and she raises the question of which is the “infirmer sex.”
The admission of shared responsibility by the first man goes together with a reassertion of gender hierarchy that is not liable to find much sympathy among today’s readers. So the Son had answered Adam’s complaint against Eve at the Judgment Scene with the rebuke that Adam’s “perfection far excelled / Hers in all real dignity” (10.150–51), and so Michael in book 11 similarly reminds Adam when he puts the onus first (“it begins”) on the “effeminate slackness,” infirm indeed, of man who was endowed from the start with “superior gifts” (11.636) than was woman. The repeated logic asserts that if the man is woman’s superior, he must be held to a stricter account and assume the greater culpability for their mutual transgression. The idea accords with Milton’s early pronouncements on male chastity: as the behavior of the “perfecter sex,” the unchastity of a man, “though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouering and dishonourable” than a woman’s, he wrote in An Apology Against a Pamphlet in 1642 (CPW 1:892)—a worse disgrace that is a worse rape.73 Pat and patriarchal as it may be, this logic nonetheless runs counter to the biblical myth that Paradise Lost takes as its subject matter, a myth that expresses the misogyny and double standard that is commonly so thought, and that exposes a matron in place of her husband. Beyond the myths of Dido and Pandora, this is the myth that book 10 attempts to reverse and redress.