Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (review)

If there was ever a literary character who speaks on both sides of the question, it might be Milton's Adam. The unfallen Adam is struck by Eve's "loveliness, so absolute she seems / And in herself complete" (PL.VIII.547-548). For the fallen Adam—before reconciliation—Eve is "thou Serpent, that name best / Befits thee, with him leagu'd, thyself as false / And hateful" (PL.X.867-869). Arguably both positions are shown to be misguided: but the poem's stance on women and gender has been a perennial topic of interest—and debate—almost from its first appearance. Ms. Miller's wide-ranging study is a fresh and significant contribution to the ongoing debate.

Engendering the Fall is divided into three sections and organized largely by chronology. Part I looks at the early seventeenth century. In Chapter One, Ms. Miller opens new ground in suggesting that Milton directly responds to the early seventeenth century querelle des femmes, in particular Joseph Swetnam's provocative The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (1615) as well as responses to Swetnam by Rachel Speght and Ester Sowernam. Paradise Lost has it both ways: incorporating Swetnam's bitterly misogynous attack as well as the women's defenses, hence helping to account for the "polyvocal" nature of gender in the poem. Ms. Miller shows how Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) strikingly parallels Milton's unfinished "The Passion" (1630) and Paradise Lost in its depiction of a gendered site of viewing and its use of a muse, and also points to links between Lanyer's praise of Margaret Clifford and Milton's representation of Adam and Eve in Eden as a kind of country house.

In Part II, Ms. Miller situates Milton's poem alongside women's writing of the English Revolution and early Restoration. Particularly pertinent to readers of the Scriblerian is Ms. Miller's case for rewritings of Milton by mid- and late-seventeenth-century women writers. She argues that while Milton suppresses the mother and re-genders the womb as male, depicting female reproduction (in the figure of Sin) as dangerous and violent, Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder emphasizes maternal procreation to challenge seventeenth-century patriarchal theory. Despite differences on politics and gender, both Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) and Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) critique empiricism—Cavendish through the creature-men scientists whose disagreement and disorder threaten a fall in the Empress's kingdom and Milton through his empirical Satan and his Eve who over-trusts the evidence of her senses.

Ms. Miller brilliantly traces how Chudleigh extensively echoes and engages Milton's work as she looks beyond the tyranny of marriage to a paradise of ungendered souls in her Song of the Three Children Paraphras'd (1703), including compressed uses of such words as "view," "ken," "gaze," "survey," and "prospect." Behn likewise disrupts and rewrites marriage, Ms. Miller shows, in Love-letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684, 1685, and 1687). Yet while Behn satirically rewrites the Genesis marriage, undermining one main ground for the monarchical state, she nonetheless remains firm in her loyalty to the monarchy. Ms. Miller then reveals how Astell's A Serious Proposal (1694) imagines a paradise of feminine education in which Milton's external female "ornament" becomes internal knowledge. Astell, Ms. Miller points out, boldly reconfigures Miltonic temptation: the real danger is not knowledge but sociability, courtship, and marriage.

With skill, she counters the tendency of Milton scholarship to separate gender, women, and family from state politics. Her astute discussions of Chudleigh, Astell, and Behn will be especially useful for readers of the Scriblerian. Other readings, while containing valuable insights, are not always as persuasive. The book makes Hutchinson and Milton appear to differ more than they do on representations of motherhood by downplaying the seed of Eve that figures so prominently in Paradise Lost as well as the positive figure of the maternal earth. Ms. Miller never fully engages Karen...