Preface

Mark Twain’s imaginative, humorous, and irreverent diaries of Adam and of Eve might seem to have little in common with Milton’s magisterial epic.¹ Twain sets the story of the first couple and the garden of Eden in Niagara Falls, honeymoon capital of North America. His Adam is primarily interested in resting, fishing, going over the falls in a barrel, building huts, and (after the Fall) hunting.² Adam ignores the animals and initially runs away from the “new creature with the long hair” (Eve), who disturbs his repose by constantly talking. Twain’s Eve names all of the creatures herself and indeed renames the garden of Eden “Niagara Falls Park”; after Eve puts up Keep off the Grass signs and various directional markers, Adam tries to emigrate. Adam is relieved when Eve starts keeping company with the talking serpent, as it gives him and the other creatures a break from Eve’s constant experimenting. The Fall occurs not because Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit (although they do) but because of a forbidden “chestnut,” a moldy old joke that Adam makes about the falls falling upward. Humanity falls because of a bad joke.³

Yet Twain’s depiction of Adam and Eve as a domestic pair draws on Paradise Lost, even while he transforms Miltonic narrative, doctrine, and depictions of gender. The two diaries focus, as does Paradise Lost, on relationships. If Twain’s Adam—in humorous contrast to Milton’s—initially tries to distance himself from Eve by running away, climbing a tree, or resettling in a different part of the garden, he eventually notices her beauty, gets used to having her around, and finally comes to value her company; by the end of Adam’s diary, he has concluded that it is better to live with Eve outside of Eden than to live in Eden without her. Twain’s Eve, from the beginning, values and cultivates relationships. She makes the animals her companions, riding the lions, tigers, and elephants, and turning the brontosaurus into a pet. When ignored by Adam, she turns to her “sister” in the pool, nearly drowning herself by jumping in for an embrace. Part of Eve’s motivation for eating the forbidden fruit is to introduce death so that the carnivorous lions and tigers will have something more appropriate to eat. When Cain is born, Eve tends and cares for the little creature, whom a puzzled Adam believes she has found in the woods and whom he variously considers to be a fish, a bug, a kangaroo, and a bear. Yet Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian relationship deepens and grows, and they eventually seem to switch roles. Eve, initially the more adventurous, intelligent, and hard-working of the two, in a late entry avows weakness and prays that she will die first so that she will not be alone without Adam. Adam has the last word in Eve’s diary. The final illustrated pages show a grieving old man sitting by a grave and contain only one Miltonic-sounding line, which also serves as Twain’s poignant tribute to his recently deceased wife, Olivia: “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”⁴

Twain’s lively and little-remarked-upon Adam and Eve can provide a starting point for this issue of Milton Studies in which contributors explore relationships within Miltonic narratives, intertextual relationships, and Milton’s own relation to philosophy and to history. Opening our first section, “Rhetoric, Recognition, Relationships,” Stanley Fish examines in his essay how, at the moment of the Fall, Satan (mis)uses rhetoric to tempt Eve to interpret the divine prohibition. Satanic rhetoric is wrong, Fish maintains, simply as rhetoric: Eve should not be listening to Satan or debating about a truth that is presupposed and known in advance and not discoverable through discourse and interpretation. In Paradise Regained, a rhetorical Satan similarly tempts the Son, who refuses to debate and interpret, seeing only with the eyes of faith. In turn, Calista McRae revises conventional views of Milton’s rhetorically appealing Satan versus a God who abjures rhetoric by investigating divine, satanic, and shifting human vocatives in...