Domestic Adam

In the bitter aftermath of the Fall, accused by her husband of indulging an inexplicable wanderlust that precipitated their mutual misery, Eve attempts to defend herself by blaming him. The Fall, she suggests, resulted from her husband's lapse in domestic responsibility, from his permissive weakness. As her head and knowing her nature, he should have forbidden her "absolutely" to leave his side.¹ Eve's accusation is significantly unsupported by other textual voices within the epic: rather than criticizing Adam, the narrator, so quick to trace discrepancies between Satan's rhetoric and inward truth, instead confirms Adam's "care / And matrimonial love" (9.318-19), while in book 10 the Son condemns Adam's choice to sin with Eve but not his earlier decision to allow her to work alone. Even Eve implicitly retracts her charge when, repentant, she promises Adam "I never from thy side henceforth [will] stray, / Where'er our day's work lies" (11.176-77). Invoking her freedom to choose a place beside her husband, Eve's words invest her former as well as her future actions with the weight of individual responsibility.

In his 1712 series of essays on Paradise Lost, Addison had no trouble recognizing the essential innocence of the debate in book 9, claiming, "It proceeds from a difference of judgment, not of passion, and is managed with reason, not with heat. It is such a dispute as we may suppose might have happened in Paradise, had man continued happy and innocent."² Modern readers, however, have often been less charitable, especially to Adam. While scholars such as Diane McColley have sensitively reappraised Eve's role in Eden, supporting her decision to work alone, Adam's behavior at this crucial juncture has been the target of frequent criticism.³ His failure absolutely to command his wife's obedience and his apparently unmotivated capitulation in the face of her persistence have been seen as the results of "his passion for Eve"⁴ or his "narcissistic dependency,"⁵ foreshadowing the fatal uxoriousness that would, short hours later, determine his fall. Having argued against the wisdom of separating, having urged the delight and edification he enjoys in his wife's company, Adam commits a "fatal blunder."⁶ Instead of "demand[ing] that Eve's love produce her obedience," in a sudden about-face he not only gives his permission but "virtually challenges her to leave," effectively "abrogat[ing] his husbandly authority by refusing to act as Eve's 'Guide and Head.'"⁷ While most readers who find fault with Adam side with Eve, a few condemn him for the opposite fault, suggesting that his attitude toward her reasonable suggestion that they work alone is cavalier. Thus, addressing her near the end of their discussion as "O woman," he "assumes the authoritative tone of superior, condescending patriarchy, exhorting Eve to obedience with a principle of wifely conduct of conspicuously unidentified authority."⁸

Is Adam too firm and fixed in his dissent, or is he not firm and fixed enough? And why, where Addison found only innocence, are modern readers inclined to apportion blame? Had Milton produced a series of treatises on marriage rather than on divorce in the early 1640s, the answers to such questions might be straightforward. Nevertheless, textual clues within the epic and their striking congruency with an ideal of marital behavior promoted in contemporary treatises direct the reader to a context that sheds light on Adam's behavior. I suggest that Milton's initial description of Adam and Eve in book 4 engages a paradox that troubled many seventeenth century discussions of marriage and establishes a relational paradigm that succinctly recapitulates the ideal toward which readers of such discussions were urged to aspire. Despite the wide divergence of modern responses to the first couple's first debate, a reappraisal of Adam's behavior in this context absolves him of the charges of both weakness and patriarchal bluster, representing the titles he fashions for his wife and the advice he gives her as consonant with an ideal of rational, humane governance.

The paradox that Paradise Lost explores is the infinitesimal degree of hierarchical difference between husband and wife, the paradigm a balance of authority and submission that honors and maintains that difference. To Puritan writers on marriage, gender hierarchy was an inescapable reality endorsed by Scripture: Eve's secondary creation, her prior transgression, the terms of her punishment, and Saint Paul's advice to women were all adduced as evidence that female subordination and male superiority were divinely sanctioned. However, the exact degree of difference resisted definition, and although the marital relationship was frequently compared to the union of Christ with the church, the common humanity of husband and wife complicated that ubiquitous analogy. In the words of William Gouge, whose treatise Of Domesticall Duties (1622) devotes 426 pages to the deportment of man and woman in matrimony, "of all degrees wherein there is any difference betwixt person and person, there is the least disparitie betwixt man and wife."⁹ Puritan doctrine further complicated the matter by insisting that, despite their hierarchical difference, man and woman were equal in the sight of God. As William and Malleville Haller remark in their classic review of Puritan treatises on marriage, "Woman was inferior to man in nature but equal . . . in grace. Her soul was as worth saving as his, and its experiences had equal significance."¹⁰ Moreover, the Genesis account itself encouraged egalitarianism: treatises repeatedly drew attention to the fact that Eve was not created from Adam's head, signifying superiority, nor yet from his foot, signifying inferiority, but from his side. She was, therefore, "of middle condition, his fellow and companion, not his servant or slave . . . of bone neare to his heart, to put him in minde of dilection and love, from under his arme of protection and defense."¹¹

The near equality of man and woman implied by the materials of Eve's creation was elaborated through various suggestive metaphors. Alexander Niccholes, who, like Milton, believed that Eve was created to alleviate "the solitude and silence which [Adam's] lonlinesse would else have been subject unto," offers a range of images to explain marital interdependence: "he that hath no wife is said to be a man unbuilt that wanteth one of his ribbes, asleepe as Adam was till his wife was made, for marriage awaketh the understanding as out of a dreame, and he that hath no wife is said to be a man in the midst of the sea, perishing for want of this ship to waft him to shore: Is saith to be parched in the heate of the Sunne, that hath not this Vine to rest him under her shadow."¹² Although conceding the hierarchical superiority of the husband, Niccholes's descriptive prose stresses the man's need of a partner for completion, succor, and success. Similarly, the Elizabethan divine Henrie Smith describes man and wife as "partners, like two oares in a boat" in his immensely popular A Preparative to Mariage (1591). In another passage he explains that husband and wife "must be fit, like two Oxen which draw the yoke together, or else all the burthen will ly upon one."¹³ Marriage, as these attempts to define it suggest, was an endeavor that required a close degree of similarity, albeit a similarity that was best appreciated imaginatively.

Maintaining the diminishing disparity between two individuals called to serve as oxen under one yoke or oars in one boat required that authority and subjection coexist in delicate balance. For this reason, perhaps, domestic conduct literature, unlike conduct manuals designed for children, is seldom a simple series of rules.¹⁴ Rather, it attempts to resolve the paradox of hierarchy and close similarity by urging both partners to participate in the production of a workable compromise. Judging from the number of pages devoted to its analysis, wifely submission was easier to define but more difficult to elicit than husbandly authority. The wife was to be content with her husband's status, live where he chose, undertake whatever business he required, and avoid spending more on clothing than his income might support.¹⁵ Prescribing the inward attitude from which such outward duties proceed was more problematic, for, as Gouge explains, subjection cannot be forced. A king captured in battle might be "compelled to yeeld homage to the conqueror" but, not thinking himself inferior, will not yield "a subjects dutie to him," rather spending his time planning escape and revenge; a wife might similarly be forced to outward compliance but remain inwardly antagonistic (270). True subjection, however, is as natural and voluntary as the hyacinth's following the sun.¹⁶ It is produced by the Christian wife as a devout response to her husband's divinely sanctioned superiority, so that "though there were no other motive in the world to move her to subjection, yet for conscience sake to Christ she should yeeld it" (Gouge, 333).¹⁷ It is active, evidenced in her swift and cheerful acquiescence to her husband's desires, her obedient performance of his commands, and her willingness to accept rebuke and "endevour to redresse what is justly reproved" (Gouge, 315, 319-20).

Although eliciting wifely subjection is perhaps more challenging, husbands are also rigorously schooled in the exercise of authority. Again, there is no simple list of rules. Rather, love is the husband's first duty, and love should determine his behavior in all facets of his relationship with his wife. Thomas Carter reminds his readers that "a man may draw more from a woman by loving and kind using of her, then any way by force,"¹⁸ while Henrie Smith once again uses imagery to urge husbands toward gentleness and patience: "As we do not handle glasses like pots, because they are weaker vesselles, but touch them nicelie, and softlie for feare of crackes, so a man must intreate his wife with gentlenesse and softnesse; not expecting that wisedom, nor that faith, nor that patience, nor that strength in the weaker vessell, which should be in the stronger."¹⁹ The recurring message is that for a marriage to succeed, wifely submission must be voluntarily produced and husbandly authority must, in Milton's words, be exercised through "gentle sway."

In his works on divorce, Milton claims familiarity with the contemporary canon of Puritan writings on marriage. Although he mentions by name only William Perkins, his education at Cambridge must have fostered an interest in emerging Puritan ideologies that survived his being "Church-outed by the Prelats."²⁰ In Tetrachordon, for example, he explains that his own seemingly radical view on divorce is no more than the logical conclusion of Puritan "Expositers," who, like ostriches, have left "their own mature positions like . . . eggs . . . in the dust" (YP 2:598). The philosophical egg Milton refers to here is the Puritan identification of "fitness" within marriage as a spiritual and personal quality, a belief that is central to his suggestion that marriage is dissolved not for adultery or desertion but when partners are no longer inwardly compatible. This is clearly not a reference to Perkins, whose Christian Oeconomie (tr. 1609) addresses the question of how to find a person "fit for marriage" by devoting 30 pages to prohibitive degrees of consanguinity and only four to spiritual parity. Rather, it is illustrated by writers like Gouge, who passes quickly over consanguinity to observe that "Mutuall love and good liking of each other is as glue" (197). It is exemplified by Smith, who explains that a spouse must not only be godly but individually "sutable; for divers women have many vertues, & yet do not fit with some men; & divers men have many vertues, & yet do not fit to some women."²¹ And it is shared by Niccholes, who emphasizes the "mutuall society and comfort of life, without which [marriage] could neither subsist nor continue" and for whom "fitness" meant not the avoidance of consanguinity but "a fitnesse in affection" without which "there is either a falling off from the bond of duty, or a shrinking up of the joy and felicity therein."²²

If Milton responds to such contemporary ideologies in Tetrachordon, the description of Adam and Eve in book 4 of Paradise Lost participates with equal transparency in the ideal of marital behavior disseminated through Puritan sermons and treatises on marriage:

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,Godlike erect, with native honour cladIn naked majesty seemed lords of all,And worthy seemed, for in their looks divineThe image of their glorious maker shone,Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,Severe, but in true filial freedom placed;Whence true authority in men; though bothNot equal, as their sex not equal seemed;For contemplation he and valour formed,For softness she and sweet attractive grace,He for God only, she for God in him:                                               . . . . . . . .She as a veil down to the slender waistHer unadornèd golden tresses woreDishevelled, but in wanton ringlets wavedAs the vine curls her tendrils, which impliedSubjection, but required with gentle sway,And by her yielded, by him best received.

(4.288-309)

In these lyrical lines, Milton reprises pages upon pages of prose in which conduct writers defined the nature, source, and consequences for both husband and wife of marital hierarchy.²³ The reader's initial glance is led to the "neere conjunction which is betwixt man and wife," rather than their disparity (Gouge, 372). Milton's description of Adam and Eve as both stamped by the divine image echoes the sense of spiritual equality that complicated gendered hierarchy for his contemporaries, while Adam's own description of Eve's origin, "out of my side . . . nearest my heart" (4.484), resonates with the commonplace observation that Eve was formed from Adam's side rather than his head or foot. As William and Malleville Haller suggest, "To the contemporary pious reader nothing in all this, except the beauty of language and verse, would have seemed unfamiliar. . . . Up to a point Milton was merely presenting in the poetic idiom of Paradise Lost what most men and women in his day, certainly most Puritans, thought about marriage, had often heard from the pulpit, and could have read in a large number of edifying books."²⁴ Audiences familiar with such books would have been attuned to the delicate negotiation of near equality in book 4 of Paradise Lost. They would surely have appreciated the paradigm epitomized in this prelapsarian relationship with its complementary "gentle sway" and willingly yielded submission. And, reading further, they would have discovered that the paradigm established in this initial description was not static but permeated the ongoing interaction of unfallen Adam and Eve, informing their physical, sexual, and verbal interactions.

"Dutiful Titles"

Adam's first address to Eve in the moments after her creation includes her name, a simple, unelaborated vocative that calls her into relationship and social identity much as his naming of the animals must have given them identity within the garden. However, any reader of Paradise Lost will have remarked upon the relative infrequency of the simple vocative as Adam and Eve converse. Before the Fall, they address each other with florid apostrophe, often omitting the other's proper name in preference for elaborate terms of address that identify the spouse in relation to the speaker. A critical tendency following Lacan to focus upon dialogue as an index of ego development in the speaker has led to what Addison once praised as "the gallantries of Paradise" being viewed with scholarly suspicion.²⁵ Adam's lyrical nomination of Eve as "Sole partner and sole part of all these joys / Dearer thyself than all" (4.411-12), for instance, has been criticized for betraying a "suspicious, Imaginary over-evaluation of Eve" or a "subtle hint of his weakness for his wife" that Satan does not fail to notice,²⁶ while Eve's address to Adam as "my guide / And head" (4.442-43) ominously suggests "an absence of autonomy and separate selfhood for Eve, and for Adam as well."²⁷ Furthermore, those scholars who call attention to reciprocity in Eden note that the first couple's "reciprocal courtesies" promote mutual love and respect but offer no rigorous analysis of how specific "courtesies" achieve this effect.²⁸ But as readers of seventeenth century conduct literature were aware, the specifics of address, rather than its generalities, are of utmost importance: when numerous variants are available (and in Eden they unarguably are) the speaker's choice of salutation carries significant messages, actively projecting identity for the addressee and insisting that identity is a social rather than an individual creation.²⁹ Thus, while it could be argued that the elaborate vocatives of Edenic speech simply follow the epic practice that resulted in such name clusters as "Agamemnon leader of men" or "Menelaus of the loud war cry," the seventeenth century reader would also have heard in these vocatives a verbal behavior that parallelled the prescriptions for couples in Puritan sermons and treatises on marriage.

This brief but pertinent advice falls into two categories: that given generally to the couple and that given more specifically to each partner. The main thrust is the same, however: terms of address must preserve the precarious equilibrium between authority and submission and confirm the identity of each partner not autonomously but within relationship, as each exists in relation to the other. Thus, explaining the importance of the first year of marriage in their Houshold Government, John Dod and Robert Cleaver specifically recommend the use of names that acknowledge marital function: "But if they shall use taunts or words of reproach and despite one against another, much hurt then may ensue thereof: For a little leaven sowreth the whole lumpe. And therefore let them use to give one to the other, their dutifull names and titles, and to eschue and shunne the contrary."³⁰ A century earlier, Erasmus had urged the reader of De civilitate morum puerilium to use such nonspecific titles as "worshypfull maysters" and "reverende fathers" only "if that privat names come nat to mynde."³¹ By the seventeenth century, however, and within marriage, titles deriving from duty were actually preferred above the use of private names, for such titles recognize and reaffirm social roles. The identity of each partner within the marriage is determined by their relationship, and the reiteration of that social contract in verbal address exerts a powerfully formative influence upon them both, reminding them of their relative, not autonomous, identity. As Dod and Cleaver assert, "many times the very name of husband, or wife, father, or sonne, master, or servant, &c. doth greatly helpe to perswade the minde, and to winne the affection; yea, the very mentioning of these names, doth oftentimes leave a print of dutie behind in the conscience."³²

Beyond the general exhortation to both partners to use titles that derive from and acknowledge marital duty, husband and wife are to observe specific verbal behaviors toward each other. The virtuous seventeenth century wife is to use forms of address that indicate subjection and reverence, and the verbal habits of godly women from the Old Testament, particularly those of Abraham's wife Sarah, are repeatedly adduced as models. Maintaining that the wife's speeches to and about her husband must be "dutifull and respective," William Whately plays Sarah as his trump card in A Bride-Bush: "Shee must not call him by light names, nor talke of him with any kinde of carelesnesse and slightness of speech, much lesse with despitefull and reproachfull termes. Heerein the godly fact of Sarah, commended to our imitation, must be followed in practice. When shee thought of her husband in the absence of all company, shee intituled him by the name of my Lord. If in her private conceit shee gaue him so good and honourable titles, what would she have done in company? what in his owne presence? what unto himself?"³³ Whately leaves these questions unanswered, and the reader is left to imagine for herself what Sarah might have called Abraham to his face. Perhaps the vocatives fashioned by Milton's unfallen Eve fill that imaginative vacuum.

In Of Domesticall Duties, Gouge explores a more eclectic sweep of possibilities. Aiming to be respectful "in their thoughts, words, deeds, and whole conversation towards their husbands," wives should avoid all "tokens of familiaritie as are not withal tokens of subjection and reverence" (284). The vocatives they particularly ought to avoid include: "those compellations which argue [the husband's] equalitie or inferioritie rather then superioritie, as Brother, Cosen, Friend, Man, &c. . . . Not unlike to those are such as these, Sweet, Sweeting, Heart, Sweet-heart, Love, Joy, Deare, &c. and such as these, Ducke, Chicke, Pigsnie, &c. and husbands Christian names, as John, Thomas, William, Henry, &c. which if they be contracted (as many use to contract them thus, Jack, Tom, Will, Hall) they are much more unseemly: servants are usually so called" (283). The use of such names fails to demonstrate subjection and reverence, while the names themselves are "tokens of familiaritie . . . unbeseeming a wife" (284). Gouge's disapproval seems to be firmly based on the power of speech to reveal attitudes in the speaker, for his main objection against such endearments is that their use indicates an undesirable insubordination in the woman.³⁴ However, the potential of apostrophe to shape the recipient by suggesting what he or she should be may well underlie Gouge's injunctions. His earlier assertion that a wife's proper exercise of reverence "cannot but much worke on the heart of a good and kinde husband, and make him the more to respect [her]" (279) leaves open the possibility that "unseemly" forms of address might also work dangerously in the husband's heart, eliciting from him equally unseemly responses to his wife. Lurking beneath Gouge's disapproval, then, is the semiarticulated fear of the performative force of words. If expressions of reverence "cannot but much worke on the heart of a good and kinde husband," what might such disrespectful names as Jack and Tom do? Might they not, by verbally enacting a marriage devoid of hierarchical respect, effect in him an attitude of inferiority and reduce him to the level of a servant?³⁵

Gouge prefers wives to use those titles that come with the legitimizing stamp of scriptural precedent, including those terms of address that some readers are concerned to find on the lips of Milton's Eve: "Head, Guide, Master, Man, and the like." But, like Dod and Cleaver, he wholeheartedly approves of "husband" as the "fittest and meetest title" (284) "Husband" certainly seems to be the title of choice. Not only prescribed in treatises and sermons on marital conduct, it is also ascribed to those who, like Katherine Stubbs, were celebrated in eulogizing literature as paragons of domestic virtue. Speaking with her husband Philip Stubbs on her deathbed, Mistress Stubbs addresses him not by his Christian name but as "Beloved husband" and "sweet husband."³⁶

Although wives are the primary recipients of advice on how to address their spouses, Gouge also has specific advice for husbands:

Among other titles the most ordinary and usuall title (wife) is a milde and kinde title, and least offensive of all other: if an husband give any other title to his wife, it must be such an one as manifesteth kindnesse, familiaritie, love, and delight. Such are all the titles which Christ giveth to the Church, as Spouse, Love, Dove, with the like. I doe not deny but that in the Song ofSalomon, and in other places of Scripture many titles are given and speeches used by Christ to the Church which are not meet to be used by husbands to their wives, because they are metaphoricall, and hyperbolicall: but yet in them all we may observe tokens of amiablenesse, kindnesse, and mildnesse, which is the end for which I have alledged his example.

But contrary are such titles as on the one side set the wife in too high a place over her husband, as Lady, Mistresse, Dame, Mother, &c. And on the other side set her in too meane a rancke, as woman, wench, &c. And their Christian names contracted, as Sal, Mal, Besse, Nan, &c. and names of kindred, as Sister, and Cosen: and, opprobrious names, as slut, drab, queane; and names more befitting beasts then wives, as Cole, Browne, Muggle, &c.

(371-72)

Again, Gouge's warning is informed by an understanding of the power of words to enact rather than simply refer. It is not the referential inaccuracy of addressing one's wife as one's mother that concerns him but rather the power of names to effect hierarchical, intersubjective identity. Ill-chosen names set the wife in an undesirable relation to her husband, creating for her a distorted persona that threatens the desired social identity of them both by eroding the delicate balance of authority and subordination required in marriage.

Gouge allows a wider range of titles to the husband than to the wife, stipulating only that they convey proper affection and in their "amiablenesse, kindnesse, and mildnesse" reflect the mysterious marriage of Christ to the church, projecting for the wife an ideal and nonthreatening identity. That Milton's Adam uses vocatives from the Song of Solomon as he whispers Eve awake at the opening of book 5 has not gone unremarked by critics.³⁷ Interestingly, however, and seldom noted, in echoing the divine Lover of the Song, Adam also parallels the ideal of matrimonial behavior advocated by conduct literature, for the interaction of the divine Lover with his Beloved is frequently cited as exemplary for the married man.³⁸

Throughout the unfallen books of Paradise Lost, the first couple's salutations exemplify the ideals set out above. Although neither deploys the preferred "ordinary and usuall title" of "husband" or "wife" (and perhaps such titles do not sit easily with the sublimity demanded of epic diction), Adam makes full use of his "prompt eloquence" (5.149), rivaling the creative latitude granted husbands to express "kindnesse, familiaritie, love, and delight," while Eve fashions apostrophes that are preeminently, invariably "dutifull and respective." Their "dutifull titles" acknowledge their respective roles as husband and wife, reflecting on the way their human society determines who they are and are becoming, while acknowledging their precedent and enabling relationship with the Creator. Further, they choose terms of address that are appropriate to the matter and purpose of their conversation, actually using epithets to introduce topics for discussion. And, as their prelapsarian conversation develops, epithets are answered by epithets in a chain of echo and reiteration.

Adam's opening apostrophe in book 4, "Sole partner and sole part of all these joys, / Dearer thyself than all" (4.411-12), dignifies Eve with an essential role in his own being and happiness. It acknowledges their close equality without setting Eve too high or too low: she is his sole partner and, of all the joys of Eden, she alone is part of him, as well as summing up in herself "what seem[s] fair in all the world" (8.472).³⁹ Moreover, containing as it does a pun on "sole" and "soul," the apostrophe recalls to mind the reflections of domestic conduct literature upon the materials and manner of Eve's creation, that "she which should lye in his bosome, was made in his bosome," not of his head or foot.⁴⁰ Made in his image, Eve partners Adam's soul and fills his self-confessed need for fellowship.

Adam's apostrophe projects for Eve an identity in which she is defined primarily in relation to him. In her responsive address Eve accepts the defining pressure of that relationship and in turn names him in relation to herself, willingly producing her own subordination:

       O thou for whomAnd from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh,And without whom am to no end, my guideAnd head, what thou hast said is just and right.For we to him indeed all praises owe,And daily thanks, I chiefly who enjoySo far the happier lot, enjoying theePre-eminent by so much odds, while thouLike consort to thyself canst nowhere find.

(4.440-48)

Eve's choice of vocatives responds to the implicit need of Adam's address, affirming her love and emphasizing her reciprocal dependence upon him by identifying him as the source and purpose of her being. It also answers the suggestion of close equality by which Adam honored her with an assertion of hierarchical difference, not as a repressive burden but as a reality that permeates and enables their relationship: Adam is her "guide" and "head," two titles that Gouge approved on the grounds of scriptural precedent. Echoing Adam's description of her as dearer than all the joys of Eden, Eve describes him as the summation of her enjoyment and, asserting her greater gratitude for a greater happiness, honors him by freely acknowledging his superiority in the hierarchy of Eden. As Adam set her apart and above the rest of the created world, so she sets him apart and above herself.

As Adam and Eve converse in Eden, they recall and repeat each other's words, engaging in responsive iteration that confirms relationships and ratifies character traits by reflecting them in speech.⁴¹ Eve concludes the story of her nativity by affirming that she now sees "How beauty is excelled by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair" (4.490-91; emphasis mine). Adam recalls this assertion and Eve's deferential suggestion that he cannot find "like consort" to himself and shapes these two utterances into a courteous affirmation of her value: she is, he tells her, his "Fair consort" (4.610). The vocative gently undermines any self-deprecation in Eve's previous speech, reestablishing the egalitarianism that characterized Adam's opening words and reassuring Eve that her choice to yield accrues only to her honor. His sharply drawn differentiation between the activities of man and animal underlines his characterization of Eve as his consort by acknowledging her joint responsibility to reform and govern the garden.

Again, Eve's response answers Adam's generous egalitarianism with titles that are "tokens of subjection and reverence" and verbally perform her willing subordination. Her vocatives recall her own earlier narration of Adam's material and verbal authoring of her, reassuring him of her willed obedience by repeating the choice she made on meeting him after her nativity: "My author and disposer, what thou bidst / Unargued I obey; so God ordains, / God is thy law, thou mine" (4.635-37). Further, her address places in Adam's hands the disposition of human knowledge and so prepares the way for the question that concludes her speech by representing him as capable within the terms of their relationship to remedy the limits of her own knowledge.⁴² It serves, in other words, as laudando praecipere, that subtle anticipatory praise "when by telling men what they are, they represent to them what they should be."⁴³ Eve not only describes Adam as he is (her physical author and her guide) but also as she desires him to be (the author and disposer of wisdom who will answer her question about the universe). Moreover, the theme and variation interplay that emerges as a characteristic of prelapsarian conversation is again present: Eve's aubade takes as its point of departure Adam's earlier claim that their relationship is a source of sweetness that surpasses all else in Eden (4.439), reversing the compliment he paid her. Adam's absence has the power to annul any actual pleasure: none of the beauties in Eden would be sweet without him.⁴⁴

Criticism of Adam's discursive style as authoritarian and purged of feeling must surely have overlooked the whispered endearments with which he wakes Eve at the beginning of book 5, which are among the most eloquent and tender in the epic: "Awake / My fairest, my espoused, my latest found, / Heaven's last best gift, my ever new delight" (5.17-19).⁴⁵ As was noted above, the names Adam fashions for his sleeping wife echo those in two passages from the Song of Solomon (2:10-13, 7:11-12). And aptly so, for Eve's dream participates in a drama of waking and search that parallels that of the Song of Solomon. On waking finally to daylight, Eve welcomes with embraces and loving names the beloved whose presence she had sought in vain in sleep, naming Adam in relation to herself as she rejects the dreamed experience of separation and temptation: "O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose, / My glory, my perfection" (5.28-29).⁴⁶ Removed from Adam in her dream and urged to perfect herself alone by sinning, she reiterates her preference for perfection in rather than without her "other self." Moreover, she names him once again in that particular relation to herself and characterized by those precise attributes that she urgently requires him to exercise: physical repose has yielded only spiritual unease, but with Adam's sole (and soul) interpretive assistance, her thoughts might find the rest they seek.

Adam's explanation of faculty psychology has most frequently been cited as the method by which he comforts Eve.⁴⁷ But faculty psychology is not all that allays Eve's anxiety, for the apostrophe that introduces it also offers reassurance. The names by which Adam addresses Eve after hearing her story assure her of his continued affection and the validity of their relationship to confer and protect identity. The voice of the dream had addressed her as "happy creature, fair angelic Eve" (5.74), suggesting an autonomous and isolated identity. Adam renames her "Best image of myself and dearer half" (5.95), answering rather than avoiding the subversive tenor of the dream with its call to individualism and self-glorification. The dream angel promised Eve happiness as a goddess among gods. Eating and then obliging her to eat, the angel forced her unwilling mimicry of itself and snatched her from the garden to flight above the earth. Adam's words draw Eve back to Eden, reasserting her reflection of and participation in his own being and reassuring her that the dream has tainted neither her nor their relationship.

"O Woman"

As an examination of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian epithets illustrates, their discursive behavior reveals the willingness with which they negotiate the subtle challenges of marital hierarchy. Unlike Satan, who argues for self-determinacy, Adam and Eve understand themselves as they participate in and are determined by relationship. They select terms of address to reflect and encourage each other's burgeoning identity, to respond to the theme of a partner's speech, to preface a variation on that theme, or to encourage the exercise of particular, timely traits. Verbally they enact the compromise advocated by domestic conduct literature, Adam choosing titles that mitigate his superiority, Eve those that demonstrate her voluntary submission. This pattern changes, however, at the beginning of book 9 and again, irreversibly, after the Fall.

The book 9 exchange begins with a simple vocative from Eve: "Adam" (9.205). Gouge, it will be remembered, advised against the wife's use of proper names, for they erode the subtle hierarchy of marriage and have the potential to effect subordination in the husband. Although Eve has previously addressed her husband as "Adam," that usage differs significantly from her first address in book 9. In book 5, about to correct his mistaken views on household economy, Eve begins with the apostrophe, "Adam, earth's hallowed mould, / Of God inspired" (5.321-22). Interestingly, at that moment and for the first time in the epic Adam's relationship to herself is not the focus of her apostrophe. Rather, she seeks to improve his understanding of God's bounty, fulfilling "that maine end for which a wife was given a man, namely, to be a helpe" (Gouge, 368-69). From the wealth of epithets available to her, she selects those that best introduce the substance of her speech and soften her correction of his mistake, for just as she understands and wisely manages earth's fruits in general, so she understands and manages this divinely inspired product of earth's mold. Now, however, in book 9, her use of the proper name "Adam" (9.289) serves not to instruct him gently in household management. Rather, her opening words initiate a startling deviation from the patterns of verbal behavior established through books 4 and 5: of her four speeches in the book 9 discussion, two (those beginning lines 322 and 378) lack any vocative forms at all, while her second speech, which begins with an echo of her former elaborate apostrophe, concludes with a repetition of the proper name to attach rebuke more pointedly to her addressee: "Thoughts, which how found they harbor in thy breast, / Adam, misthought of her to thee so dear?" (9.288-89). Closest her husband's heart, where she should be cherished, lurks suspicion.

Moreover, the one instance of elaborate address that Eve now deploys compares uneasily with her earlier vocatives that set Adam in intimate relation to herself and their Creator. "Offspring of heaven and earth, and all earth's lord" (9.273) seems to acknowledge Adam's hierarchical superiority but actually isolates him from intimate relationship, for his position as her lord, the theme of her vocatives throughout book 4, remains unarticulated or is at best assumed in his general lordship of the earth. At this moment of crisis, Eve selects titles for her husband that, while accurate and ostensibly respectful, are also peculiarly exalted and remote. Furthermore, the specificity and intimacy of the origins invoked by the apostrophe in book 5 ("earth's hallowed mould / Of God inspired") are here replaced by a general and impersonal derivation. The process of Adam's generation is left undefined, no longer the result of divine inspiration of sacred matter. Notable, too, is Eve's subsequent description of God not as "our maker" but, impersonally, as "the maker" (9.338; emphasis mine).

This sudden depersonalization in Eve's choice of vocatives, reflecting, perhaps, her new desire to explore the possibilities of autonomy, is highlighted by the consistency with which Adam affords her "dutifull and respective" titles. Responding to her suggestion that they work alone, he addresses her in familiar terms: "Sole Eve, associate sole, to me beyond / Compare above all living creatures dear" (9.228-29). The apostrophe reprises his first address in book 4 and, as it did there, the suggested pun on sole/ soul reminds Eve of her unique importance. Now, more explicitly than in book 4, it also serves as laudando praecipere, urging the continued solace and association he will request in his ensuing speech. His next apostrophe reestablishes the repetition that played an important part in their earlier vocatives. Responding to Eve's "Offspring of heaven and earth, and all earth's lord," Adam echoes her syntax but uses the echo to reassert the intimacy and specificity of identity within relationship, naming her "Daughter of God and man, immortal Eve" (9.291). The impersonal "offspring" of Eve's address becomes the personal "daughter," while God, not heaven, is reestablished as the author of being. The narrator informs us that Adam addresses Eve with "healing words." That healing begins in his choice of vocatives and his gentle substitution of the personal and social for the impersonal and autonomous in determining identity.

But Adam's style of address, too, alters in his final response to Eve: "O woman, best are all things as the will / Of God ordained them" (9.342-43).⁴⁸ His persistent use of elaborate epithets through the debate until this moment makes this last apostrophe the more striking. "Woman" is one of the titles that Gouge advised the husband to avoid because it "set [the wife] in too meane a rancke" (372). But does this shift necessarily reveal "superior, condescending patriarchy"? Until this point, Adam's terms of address have been generously egalitarian; now instead of emphasizing close similarity, he selects a form of apostrophe that exaggerates hierarchical difference and by doing so conveys rebuke. However, that rebuke need not be read as originating in personal affront nor as insisting on Eve's hierarchical inferiority to himself. Adam has been happy until this point to repair Eve's neglect of domestic etiquette with loving epithets; his vehemence is aroused not by her responses to him but by her remark that "Eden were no Eden thus exposed," with its implication that the very design of creation may be flawed. His "O woman" echoes — or more properly anticipates — Saint Paul's response to the straw man of Romans 9:20 who questions God's justice: "Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?" Adam's "O woman" conveys a similar rebuke, reminding Eve not so much of the respective status of man and woman but, more importantly, of the vast hierarchical difference between creature and creator.

"The Principles of Humanity"

If this single aberration in Adam's mode of addressing his wife during the debate arises, as I suggest it does, from his jealousy of God's honor, not his own, what of his final, dismissive speech? Moments after his vehement defense of the Creator's wisdom and creation's perfect order, having suggested that Eve might be safer by his side, Adam apparently changes tack. Having urged his wife to remain with him, now he yields to her desire to separate: "But if thou think, trial unsought may find / Us both securer then thus warned thou seemst, / Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more" (9.370-72). These, of course, are the words Eve will later recall as she accuses him of failing in his domestic responsibilities. These are the words that for some critics witness his abrogation of "husbandly authority" and constitute his "fatal blunder."⁴⁹ I would not for a moment deny that Adam's passion for Eve determines his fall. But to blame him at this point is to overlook the fact that once again his verbal behavior delicately negotiates the paradox of near equality, echoing protocols established in early modern conduct literature for handling domestic disputes.

Beyond the names he might give his wife, the husband's behavior toward her, especially in the duties of instruction and rebuke, receives extended attention in conduct literature. The first point conduct writers are concerned to establish is that his execution of these duties is to be verbal, not physical. "Her cheekes," writes Henrie Smith, "are made for thy lippes, and not for thy fistes. The verie name of a wife, is like the Angell which stayed Abrahams hand when the stroke was comming."⁵⁰ While all conduct writers eschew violence, they also closely prescribe the husband's verbal behavior: Whately devotes 18 pages to instructing husbands how to instruct and rebuke their wives, while Gouge's advice on these topics stretches to 24 pages.

Again, because Milton turned his attention in the 1640s to the problems of divorce rather than a description of marriage, it can be difficult to determine to what extent his views on marital disputes coincide with those of his Puritan contemporaries. His response to Mary Powell's long absence in Oxford indicates a degree of personal tolerance, and his attitudes toward women in the divorce tracts are also suggestive. Although he insisted that Moses granted divorce for the benefit of the husband, the marital ideal that emerges through the divorce tracts strongly promotes mutual compatibility and happiness and necessarily entails considerable respect for women. This respect emerges all the more decisively when one compares the limits Milton sets to female subordination to the limits set by his contemporaries in two frequently debated scenarios: the godly wife married to an unbeliever and the wise woman married to an inept husband.

Milton's contemporaries, wary of the ramifications of their belief that marriage was most importantly an internal, spiritual union, not only denied the dissolution of marriage for spiritual incompatibility but also insisted that marital hierarchy remained in force in such cases. When Gouge, for example, asks whether a "wise, sober, religious Matron" must consider a husband "of lewd and beastly conditions, as a drunkard, a glutton, a profane swaggerer, an impious swearer, and blasphemer . . . her superiour, and worthy of an husbands honour," his answer is brief and unambiguous: "Surely she must" (273). Milton's response is notably more compassionate: "the wife also, as her subjection is terminated in the Lord, being her self the redeem'd of Christ, is not still bound to be the vassall of him, who is the bondslave of Satan: she being now neither the image nor the glory of such a person, nor made for him, nor left in bondage to him; but hath recours to the wing of charity, and protection of the Church; unless there be a hope on either side; yet such a hope must be meant, as may be a rationall hope, and not an endles servitude" (YP 2:591). Unlike Gouge, who condemns a Christian woman to a life of unrelieved misery, Milton insists that spiritual disparity does terminate the marriage and makes a particular point of liberating the woman, as well as the man, from a relationship that would reduce close equality to intolerable vassalage.

The second scenario sheds further light on the essential humanity of Milton's marital ideal. Although the state of female education meant that women's intellectual inferiority was often a sad reality, writers of domestic conduct literature did contemplate the possibility of "a wise, vertuous, and gratious woman . . . maried to an husband destitute of understanding, to a very naturall . . . or a frenzy man, or to one made very blockish, and stupid, unfit to manage his affaires through some distemper, wound, or sicknesse" (Gouge, 287-88). Henrie Smith has no hesitation in advocating a course of behavior for the wife of such a man: "she must not examine whether he be wise or simple, but that she is his wife, and therefore they which are bound must obey."⁵¹ Gouge, perhaps more practically, suggests that in cases of "impotencie" or "impossibilitie," or when a husband fails to make appropriate arrangements for the management of his household prior to an extended absence, the wife might govern. Significantly, though, she does so without her husband's prior knowledge or approval; his condition means that his "consent is not to be expected," and he remains oblivious of her inversion of marital hierarchy (288).

Milton's response, in contrast, emphasizes mutual understanding, openness, and humanity. Although he acknowledges that scriptural authority places the wife beneath her husband, he suggests that "particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yeeld, for then a superior and more naturall law comes in, that the wiser should govern the lesse wise, whether male or female" (YP 2:589). Instead of forbidding the wife to question her husband's authority or endorsing a covert usurpation under the conditions of husbandly impotence, Milton suggests a solution that is both rational and radical: an amicable agreement between individuals that prioritizes natural capacity above scripturally endorsed gender hierarchy. For Milton, "the principles of humanity" determine what behavior is appropriate within marriage and require that neither husband nor wife be "enthrall[ed] . . . to duties or to sufferings" (YP 2:592). While Milton's works on divorce remain silent on the issues of marital disputes, then, their deep humanity suggests that the advice given by his Puritan contemporaries might serve as an imperfect prototype for Milton's own.

Two key elements in the husband's verbal behavior, both elaborated at length by conduct writers, have particular bearing on Adam's words to Eve in book 9. In the first place, conduct writers agree that in all instances the wife's essential humanity and particular disposition must be respected. Instructions must be moderated by "the understanding and capacity of thy wife" and intermingled with "sweet and pithy perswasions, which are testimonies of great love" (Gouge, 373). (The reader might recall that Milton's Eve prefers her husband's tutelage to that of Raphael because of his intermingling of such "perswasions.") Similarly, rebukes must be reserved until the wife is in an appropriate frame of mind to receive them. Until she is, the husband is to refrain from exercising this duty, even if that means that in the interim he remains silent while she scolds: better, Whately suggests, "that she have the last word, then both multiply worse words."⁵²

Secondly, although husbands have been given authority by God, they must temper that authority with meekness, reserving direct commands for situations of gravity and not desiring to "bee Lord in every thing."⁵³ Gouge describes husbands who demand that their wives obey their every whim as wielding their authority "like a swaggerers sword, which cannot long rest in the sheath, but upon every small occasion is drawne forth" (378). The picture is of a husband addicted to control and verging on violence. Such husbands, when their wives fail in instant obedience or understanding, "will be angry with them, and in anger give them evill language," behavior that is not only nonproductive but also damaging. "This harshnesse," Gouge writes, "is ordinarily so fruitlesse, and withall so exasperateth a womans spirit, as I thinke he were better clene omit the duty then doe it after such a manner" (373). Similar advice is found in Whately's Bride-Bush, which exhorts its reader "so carry thy selfe to thy wife, that she may perceive herselfe to have entred, not into servile thraldome, but loving subjection."⁵⁴ Both writers agree that it is better that the husband defer his duty to instruct or rebuke his wife than that he do so in a manner that causes her distress.⁵⁵

Underpinning these injunctions to temper authority with mildness and consider at all points the impact of instruction or rebuke on its recipient is, once again, the commonplace that "the man is to his wife, in the place of Christ to his Church."⁵⁶ As Whately explains, "Christ beseecheth his Church most an end, which hee might with most right command. Let the husband imitate that best husband, and beware of, Doe it, or you had best; and, You shall whether you will or no: I will have it so to crosse you." Rather, like Christ, the husband should so "governe his wife, & provoke her to accomplish his will with quiet, pleasing and insinuating termes, rather than open and expresse, much lesse violent commandings."⁵⁷ Similarly, Gouge states that a wife's submission should be requested rather than openly commanded: "As the use of an husbands authoritie in commanding must be so rare, so when there is occasion to use it, it must be with such mildnesse and moderation tempered, so as (according to Saint Pauls example) though he have power to command that which is convenient, yet for loves sake he rather intreat it" (378). If conduct literature, urging the example of the divine bridegroom's interactions with his spouse, advises the early modern husband to entreat where he might command and to desist if he sees his wife unresponsive, would a contemporary reader have condemned Adam's decision to allow Eve to leave? Might not such a reader have rather applauded his exemplary forbearance? Adam's words are designed to preserve the balance of authority and submission that Eve's momentary resistance seems to imperil: soliciting rather than demanding compliance, he uses "quiet" and "pleasing" terms, entreating Eve to stay "for love's sake" rather than resorting to "open and express" commands.

What, then, is the husband to do when the wife refuses his instruction or ignores his rebuke, as Eve seems to do the morning of the Fall? Should he persist, as Joan Bennett suggests Adam should have done, until his superior reasoning allows her to correct her own faulty logic?⁵⁸ According to conduct literature, there are some "extraordinary" circumstances that require more than mild entreaty from a husband, such as the wife's fall into "an heinous notorious sinne." In such instances, Gouge allows that "some sharpnesse may be used" (384). Similarly, Whately sets limits to the husband's Christ-like willingness to overlook faults, but only if and when the wife "comes to some wilfulnes in sinning" or proves herself to "be more than ordinarily unruly."⁵⁹ But even when in debates over spiritual issues the wife rejects her husband's instruction and acts with apparent wilfulness, her husband must still consider the impact of restraint upon her conscience. According to Gouge, "Though the husbands command be sufficient warrant to the wife, and if he peremptorily presse her to this or that, she ought to yeeld, yet the love and mildnesse required of an husband should make him so to tender her as to remit something of his power, and when he seeth her conscience troubled about his command, to releeve her conscience by forbearing to presse that which seemeth so burthensome to her" (375). The wise husband, realizing in such instances that his instructions directly impinge upon his wife's ability to follow the promptings of her conscience, will desist from exerting authority and allow her to make her own decision.

Liberty of conscience was, of course, one of the great ideals in whose service Milton expended both energy and ink. The final question to be asked in exoneration of Milton's Adam, then, is whether Eve's conscience, rather than simply her powers of reasoning, is troubled by the advice he gives her during the debate. The narrator tells us that she "thought / Less attributed to her faith sincere" (9.319-20) and, disturbed by what she perceived as insult to her integrity, claimed that to suppose her insufficient alone to overcome temptation would make a mockery of their "happy state" in Eden. What is at stake is Eve's belief in the divine gift of human sufficiency, the subject of the Father's opening disquisition in the divine colloquy of book 3. Eden as an exterior, physical reality is indeed "frail," its best defenses easily breached by the enemy, its angelic guard at least temporarily baffled. But, as Lewalski notes, this "perilous exposure of Eden" is central to the vision of "moral reality" outlined in Areopagitica and enacted in Paradise Lost: "physical or external protections cannot really safeguard man from the attractions of evil, so that his only true security is in watchfulness and constant growth in virtue and wisdom." Eden, for man or woman, is, in the final analysis, an inward state.⁶⁰

As we have seen, Adam corrects Eve using "some sharpnesse":

O Woman, best are all things as the willOf God ordained them, his creating handNothing imperfect or deficient leftOf all that he created, much less man,Or aught that might his happy state secure,Secure from outward force; within himselfThe danger lies, yet lies within his power:Against his will he can receive no harm.

(9.343-50)

But a simple assertion of the divinely created sufficiency of the will would be an inadequate response to Eve's concern if Adam, having explained that man is indeed capable of repulsing evil without outward aid, should then insist that Eve remain with him. Such imposed restraint would only enforce her suspicion that her own sufficiency is still in doubt. Instead, Adam judges it better "to remit something of his power" and to "releeve her conscience by forbearing to presse that which seemeth so burthensome to her." Having urged her to stay for love's sake, he allows her to leave for her own, affording her the autonomy her terms of address and her argument for separation seek. Had Eve returned unfallen to receive Adam's garland of roses, she might, as conduct manuals suggest a wife might under such mild and loving governance, have freely admitted her error and the wisdom of his advice. She might have expressed regret for words "so erroneous" without that sad addition obliged by the Fall: "thence by just event / Found so unfortunate" (10.969-70).

In the brief narrative interlude after Adam's penultimate speech and before Eve's response, the narrator describes Adam's attitude and motivation with the simple, yet eloquent summation: "So spake domestic Adam in his care / And matrimonial love" (9.318-19). Perhaps our belief that modernity is characterized by a superior egalitarianism persuades us to overlook the narrator's guiding voice and to read Adam's words that fateful morning as evidence of uxoriousness or patriarchal superiority. The context of conduct literature obliges us to reappraise such readings. Although Milton's familiarity with any specific treatise on marriage must remain a matter of speculation, his creation of Adam and Eve clearly engages with the paradox of near equality that perplexes the writings of his Puritan contemporaries and offers as a paradigm a marriage of rational humanity in which authority is gently urged and submission willingly produced. Here, as in so many other passages of his great epic, resonates Milton's claim in The Reason of Church-Government that poetic ability is "of power beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu, and publick civility" (YP 1:816). An early reader familiar with Puritan ideologies would have found in the loving and respectful names that "domestic Adam" fashions for his spouse, in his gentle entreaties and his respect for her struggling conscience, a literary exemplar of the ideal early modern husband.