"Man's effeminate s(lack)ness:" Androgyny and the Divided Unity of Adam and Eve

In the world of Milton’s Paradise Lost there exists an implicit imbalance between the sexes, in that man suffers a wrenching sense of differential lack, whereas woman is apparently more self-sufficient and independent of the other sex. Put another way, sexuality is asymmetrical: potentially divisive and even fatal for the male, whereas for the female it is potentially advantageous. To this conception the poem opposes the ideal of a prelapsarian comic union of the sexes, something like Spenser’s Hermaphrodite, and the related notion of a single sex as being sufficient in itself. Eve claims self-sufficiency when she stares narcissistically into the mirroring waters of Book 4, and Adam too makes a claim to be self-sufficient before he comes to feel the want of a mate. This self-sufficiency is at the heart of the paradoxical idea of single sex androgyny or wholeness—one sex without need of the other because it comprises both in itself. I argue that the eventual sundering of the sexes as a consequence of the Fall already informs the seemingly harmonious conjunction of the sexes even before sin and difference enter the world in historical time.

I will show how the sexes in Paradise Lost are are interdependent before the Fall, unhappily so, and how this necessitates a move away from union and toward separate and divided sexes. Milton explicitly rejects Aristophanes’ account of the origin of the sexes in Plato’s Symposium, where the two sexual components are originally conjoined, only to be separated as punishment for offending the gods. In Tetrachordon Milton maintains that the original human could not have been both male and female, “however the Jewes fable, and please themselves with the accidentall concurrence of Plato’s wit, as if man at first had bin created Hermaphrodite” (Milton, Works 4:76). In the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis, we read that the sexes were created as a single unit: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1.27;AV). Some early exegetes interpreted this to mean that the division into separate male and female sexes did not occur until after the Fall. If the original human had been hermaphroditical, Milton counters, then Genesis would have said “in the image of God created he them” instead of “created he him.” ¹

Mediating between the creators, God and Milton, and their embodied creation, and serving as the messengers between the two realms, are the angels, “those male, / These Feminine. For Spirits when they please / Can either Sex assume, or both” (1.422–24). ² Although the angels are bodiless, their coupling produces a sexual pleasure that far exceeds what humans are capable of (8.619–29). The angel experiences in itself the pleasures peculiar to both sexes, for it knows none of the limitations that stem from distinctions of kind. The fallen Adam laments that humans know a sexual difference foreign to the angels:

  O why did God, Creator wise, that peopl’d highest Heav’n With Spirits Masculine, create at last This novelty on Earth, this fair defect Of Nature, and not fill the World at once With Men as Angels without Feminine, Or find some other way to generate Mankind?

(10.888–95)

In fantasy Adam appropriates the androgynous angels to the masculine gender before the Fall, preferring a reductive, sexless sameness to any prospect for the androgynous harmonization of difference, arguing in this postlapsarian moment that any contamination of the male sex by the other is debilitating, now that human beings are so distant from Raphael’s account of angelic sexuality. Adam’s account marks woman as a “defect” in masculine fullness; she retrospectively vitiates the integrity of male spirit. But is Adam’s prelapsarian state also marred, I wonder, by “defect”?

In Book 8 of Paradise Lost Adam complains of a lack that undermines his sense of well-being. Unlike God the creator, the creature, although a unity, needs a supplement to his oneness, an other...