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New Literary History 32.2 (2001) 327-345



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Eve's Otherness and the New Ethical Criticism

Lee Morrissey


I

Two decades ago, Sandra M. Gilbert described Milton's Paradise Lost as "the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the Gods which is also, for her, the garden of poetry." 1 Gilbert was not the first reader to reach the conclusion that Paradise Lost narrates the story of women's first and therefore supposedly "natural" exclusion. As early as the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson referred to Milton's "contempt of females." 2 But after Gilbert, Eve's otherness becomes a central topic of the poem; subsequently, for example, Karen Edwards can sketch "an adversarial debate between 'prosecutorial' and 'apologetic' critics," 3 between those who think that Milton places Eve in a secondary position of otherness and those who see Milton as ahead of his time "in granting women a dignity and responsibility rarely conceded in the seventeenth century." 4 In this essay, I argue for a third way, one that relies precisely on what Gilbert calls Eve's "otherness" to reconcile the "prosecutorial" and the "apologetic" approaches. 5 For Gilbert, Eve's otherness makes the poem antifeminist. Those who disagree usually explain this otherness away, as for example by contextualizing it in seventeenth-century terms. In the third way I am proposing, however, what both sides treat as the scandal of the poem--Eve's otherness--becomes instead its topic.

The recent "ethical turn" (descending largely from the work of Emmanuel Levinas) in literature makes possible accepting Gilbert's prosecutorial recognition of Eve's otherness while reading Paradise Lost in both apologist and feminist terms. For both sides underestimate how the poem might be concerned precisely with a consideration of Eve's response to having been placed in the position Gilbert describes as "her otherness." Since Gilbert first articulated her claim, literature has learned--from feminist arguments such as Gilbert's, from postcolonial approaches, from deconstruction, and from Emmanuel Levinas--to take otherness into account in reading. 6 In this essay, combining recent reconsiderations of otherness in general and Gilbert's point concerning Eve's otherness, I argue that Paradise Lost--specifically through the [End Page 327] relationship between Adam and Eve--tells the story of (the difficulty of) what Thomas Docherty describes as "an articulation of the ethical relation to alterity." 7 The challenge facing Adam is, using Docherty's terms, "to find a means of addressing l'autre without reducing it to autrui" (A 7), of addressing Eve without reducing her to an other, of taking her singularity into account without turning that difference itself into an otherness. As Gilbert shows, Adam fails spectacularly. But Adam's failure is so spectacular that it seems to represent one of the central points of the poem, constituting as it does the process to which Eve's central decision is a response. It is one thing to exclude, as Adam does to Eve at the beginning of their relationship, and quite another to choose to separate, as Eve later does. The latter represents a rejection of how Adam had tried to turn her into an other.

II

What Lawrence Buell calls "the new ethical criticism" focuses on three related problems: how to describe otherness, how to relate responsibly to an other, and how to compare an idea of otherness to the experience of reading a text. 8 In the way it addresses those issues, new ethical criticism is part of what Zygmunt Bauman calls Postmodern Ethics. As Bauman points out, modern ethics emphasized the similarity between one and an other. Using Georg Simmel as the representative modernist, Bauman explains that modern ethics "stripped man of all 'particularistic' trappings and pared him to the (assumed) 'all-human' . . . so that--it was hoped--'what is common to all man as such, can emerge in him as his essence.'" 9 For Simmel, "all relations with others are thus ultimately mere stations along the road...

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