ADAM'S OTHER SELF: A READING OF MILTON'S EVE.
Item
-
Title
-
ADAM'S OTHER SELF: A READING OF MILTON'S EVE.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8112746
-
identifier
-
8112746
-
Creator
-
PECZENIK, FANNIE.
-
Contributor
-
Prof. Samuel I. Mintz
-
Date
-
1981
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
The Eve of Paradise Lost irritates modern sensibilities. On the one hand, it is recognized that Eve's subjugation to Adam is a truth universally acknowledged in the seventeenth century and that there is no reason to expect Milton to differ from his contemporaries. On the other hand, Milton seems to insist on the domestic hierarchy with such a vengeance that many feminist critics, echoing Dr. Johnson's dictum that Milton had a Turkish contempt for women, have singled out Paradise Lost as a particularly virulent example of the patriarchal oppression of the female. A close reading of the poem in the light of both the traditional Genesis commentary and the prevailing opinions on the nature of marriage and the relation between the sexes shows that Milton, rather than repeating the prejudices of his culture, exploits them to create an Eve who sums up all that is female without summing up all that is inferior and secondary. In describing the Fall of man and the loss of innocence, Milton offers an explanation for the historical condition of women.;Rabbinic and Christian commentaries traditionally derive the nature and purpose of the female sex from Eve's creation from the rib of the sleeping Adam. Milton's version of the creation of Eve turns the cryptic scriptural account, long used as a rationale for the subordination of women, into a love-dream in which the rib becomes an emblem of reciprocity. Milton further subverts the domestic hierarchy by altering the terms of the traditional allegory of the two sexes. In Paradise, male and female do not represent the dichotomy of heaven and earth or spirit and flesh, but, for the sake of the terrestrial Garden which is man's proper home, they represent the two modes of sense perception which are, according to Renaissance theory, capable of inducing love: hearing and sight. In Paradise, the realm of the eye, embodied in the visual beauty of Eve, holds equal dominion with the reasoning words which are the domain of Adam.;The initial description of Adam and Eve in Book IV underscores their differences, which are more than superficial attributes, and seems to assert the marital hierarchy of male domination and female submission. But this first vision of prelapsarian mankind is a tease for the fallen consciousness. The innocent concept of equality is synonymous with the amorous reciprocity revealed to Adam at Eve's creation and is best expressed by Adam's metaphor of musical concord when he begs God for a mate. In Eden, equality is not a measure of one's place in a universal hierarchy, but a measure of the help one creature can afford another. In prelapsarian terms, the first marriage is a thoroughly egalitarian institution.;The theoretical basis for the marriage is tested in the debate prior to Eve's parting to garden separately. This scene is not a disastrous prelude to the Fall but a pragmatic exercise of the fit help God ordained between man and wife. The innocent assumptions made by both Adam and Eve during this debate cast an ironic light on the conventional wisdom of the contemporary domestic treatises and marriage sermons.;At the Fall, Eve accepts the Satanic belief in female inferiority. She aspires to equal Adam not because the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has given her the wit to rebel against him, but because she has lost the innocence that obviated the need to question her status. Adam and Eve begin their exile resigned to the familiar seventeenth-century domestic hierarchy, but Milton has revealed that the subjugation of women is a consequence of the corruption of the human mind.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
