'Paradise Lost' - "Our Flesh is An Eve Within Us"[1]- The Presentation of Eve and her role in the Fall.

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                Exam No: 38691

Word Count: 3,266

‘Paradise Lost’

“Our Flesh is An Eve Within Us”

- The Presentation of Eve and her role in the Fall

Paradise Lost begins and ends with Man, but this is not Man as we know him in daily life, nor indeed as he is usually depicted in literature, but a perfect, pre-lapsarian Man. The primary concern of this epic poem appears to be “man’s first disobedience” and the results of that action. However, although Milton uses the word “man”, it is universally understood that it was not a man, but a woman who disobeyed God and brought about the downfall of the human race. This woman is Eve.

Diane Kelsey McColley in her book Milton’s Eve asserts that the “story of our first parents shows woman as flesh, passions, nature, and sexuality seducing man as soul, reason, spiritual virtue and contemplation from his proper relation to God”. The portrayal of Eve as primordial temptress is a long-standing one and can be found not only discursively in literary history but also pictorially in art history, and these traditions are perhaps accountable for the reductive opinion of Eve today.

Before Paradise Lost, literary accounts of the Fall interpreted the story as male virtue undone by female concupiscence and masculine reason undermined by feminine passion. This blame for Eve as Adam’s inferior perhaps originates from the source of the story, the book of Genesis. When God discovered that the apple had been eaten, He inquired of Adam whether he had eaten from the tree of knowledge. Unquestionably accepting his answer that the blame should be heaped on Eve, for it was she who had given it to him, He then proceeded to accuse her for the disobedience:

“And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?” (Genesis 3:13)

This accusation is directed only at Eve, as God assumes Adam’s view that she is the one to blame. When the Lord comes to dealing with punishment for their actions, it would appear that Adam’s wrongdoing was primarily in the fact that he listened to and obeyed his wife, as this action is the one God stresses firstly and unnecessarily; with the eating of the apple - and thus the contravening of His law – coming as a secondary citation for punishment:

“And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten from the tree…” (Genesis 3:17)

It may be surprising that even after the easing of patristic restrictions on women’s liberty resulting from the Reformation, Puritan and moderate Anglican writers still continued to echo the reductive view of Eve and therefore women in general. Such a case is John Donne, who draws on the established authority of the Bible and shares such opinions as:

“…ye wives, be in subjection to your husbands;…” (I Peter 3:1)

“…ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel…” (I Peter 3:7)

The idea that women are “weaker”, secondary beings who lack in some way the virtues and the higher intellect of men, is reinforced as an established idea by Aristotle’s statement that the female is “a deformity…of nature…perhaps rather bad than good”, and Plato’s that men are reborn as women if they have been “cowards or led unrighteous lives”.

It is perhaps a result of these ingrained ideas, that painters and poets have rarely captured what Milton dwells on in his epic, the innocent pre-lapsarian lives of Adam and Eve, and instead have focused on the temptation and downfall of the first man and woman and its symbols – Adam, Eve, the serpent and the tree.  Within these portraits, there can be found many depictions of Eve. She is predominantly wanton in one, and yet frailly dignified in another; but in all can be found an emphasis on her fantastic beauty, which is presented as a glorious attribute and yet a cunning snare - ultimately the source of the loss of the paradisal garden she embodies.

McColley discusses some examples of this iconographic tradition in her book, including  Raphael’s ceiling fresco, Stanza della Segnatura. The tree of knowledge stands between Adam and Eve, literally and symbolically the object that divides them. Encircling this instrument of division is the catalyst of the Fall, the serpent, half-hidden in the shade of the tree. Adam, half-sitting, gazes at the tree with his palm outstretched, mirroring Eve’s gesture. However, she is standing upright in the dominant position, openly gazing at him with a knowing look full of concupiscence and temptation. It is difficult to observe from the print in the book, but McColley states that not only is the serpent “half woman; it is a shadowed Eve: the same half-turned face, straight nose, bowed mouth, and rounded breasts, the same hair…waved back over the left shoulder and hanging loose on the right, each grasping a limb of the tree, their heads nearly touching, and each bending on Adam the same provocative gaze.”

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This image of Eve as the beautiful and debilitating seductress, akin with the serpent, represents the dark and dangerous side of the Fall and of Eve herself. This representation suggests to the viewer, by linking beauty and sexuality with the Fall, that Eve’s qualities were inherently corruptive. If this is the case – and I do not necessarily believe this to be true – then the God who created her and gave her to Adam to be “fit help”(VIII: 450), would be, as the fallen Adam claims, baiting a trap. To see Milton’s Fall as the central action of the poem ...

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