Gender and the Power of Relationship: "United as one individual Soul" in Paradise Lost

SIX: The Many Faces of Eve

108 Gender and the Power of Relationship 108 SIX The Many Faces of Eve Milton’s presentation of human relationships in Paradise reveals tensions and contradictions resulting in part from his scriptural source, in part from the presence of several characters (for example, Eve, Adam, Satan, Raphael, the Son, the narrator) who offer their individual and not always consistent views of gender and hierarchy, and in part from Milton’s tendency to represent the conflict and dynamism of “opposite motion.” As source materials for Paradise Lost, Milton inherited both a primary text, Genesis, and an exegetical tradition possessed of inherent tensions. How was one to reconcile the egalitarian spirit of God’s plan to create man in the divine image as male and female, in Genesis 1:26–27, with the description in the next chapter of the secondary creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib? Elaine Pagels points out the obvious origin of the discrepancy: “Most biblical scholars today agree that the two creation accounts, originally separate, were later joined to make up the first three chapters of Genesis. The story of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:4f), [generally termed Jahwist] told in the language of folklore, is considered the older of the two The Many Faces of Eve 109 accounts, dating to 1000–900 B.C.E.; the account now placed first (Genesis 1:1–2:3) [the Priestly] dates to postexilic theologians (c. 400 B.C.E.).”1 But for the seventeenth century reader and interpreter who attributed the Pentateuch to Moses, coming to terms with the disparate voices and values of the Jahwist and Priestly versions of Creation called for fairly fancy hermeneutic footwork, and the space devoted to considerations of the Genesis text in Protestant commentary testifies to the age’s interest in theological matters and gender issues while highlighting the controversies inherent in the interpretive process. Typically, commentators viewed the Creation account in Genesis, chapter 2, as a recapitulation and expansion of Genesis, chapter 1. Henry Ainsworth (1616) notes “how Moses changeth the order in [Gen. 2]; enlarging things here, which before he had touched briefly” (Gen. 2:22).2 John Downame and others (1645) go a step further in explaining away these disparities: “it may be said, that the matter of the creation, or the material parts, of several kinds of creatures were delivered in the first Chapter, and the manner of some particular works (more eminent than the rest) recorded in the second Chapter, and so there is no inversion of order; or if there were, God is not tied to Logical rules either for the course of his working, or for the discourse and history of his works” (Gen. 2:8).3 More specifically, the wrinkles and spaces in the text that exist as a result of different authorship and dating are routinely ignored, dismissed, or “ironed out” by seventeenth century readers. However, Milton, who incorporates both versions of the Creation in his own recapitulation and expansion of Genesis in Paradise Lost, has the advantage of associating views with individual characters and imagined contexts so that contradictions are not overlooked or explained away; rather, by creating different “authors,” each with his or her own voice and values, and by “dating” these diverse “texts” through the poem’s distinct chronology, Milton exposes and brings into high relief the contradictions in his text. 110 Gender and the Power of Relationship The case of Eve illustrates this point. Between the time of her creation until the primal couple’s expulsion from Paradise (narratively from book 4 through book 12), Milton presents first woman to the reader in many, often contradictory, guises. For example, the poet invents a scene in which Adam, after naming the animals as they approach him “two and two” (8.350), debates with the Creator man’s need for an equal rather than an inferior mate, expressing quite eloquently his desire for one “fit to participate / All rational delight” (390–91); but Milton also invents a scene in which Adam, attempting to explain and justify to a visiting angel his sense that he is not altogether master of himself in Eve’s presence, bespeaks a mastery over her, claiming that she is th’ inferior, in the mind And inward Faculties, which most excel, In outward also her resembling less His Image who made both. (541–44) On the occasion of Adam’s appeal for...