"Eve's Role in Paradise Lost"

 

 

John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered to be one of the greatest works produced in the 17th century, and indeed to be one of the most influential and popular works in recent literary history. Detailing Adam and Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden, it presents a slightly different view than the traditional Biblical version of the story of man’s fall. Milton’s version of this story raises many important and new questions about Adam and Eve’s fall from Paradise, and a very popular criticism is the portrayal of Eve as subordinate and inferior to Adam. Many feel that Eve is shown as naïve, narcissistic, and simply a lesser part of Adam, while Adam himself is portrayed as rational, and intelligent. This critique translates into women being lesser parts of men, which has long been a problem of society. However, closer examination of Paradise Lost reveals that perhaps this is not the case. While Eve’s actions throughout the poem at first glance seem to be uninformed, and she is painted as acting this way simply because she is female, upon closer look, there is much more to Eve than is originally presented. While Adam and Eve are not completely equal, they have a certain equality that allows them to come together as a unit, rather than two separate entities. As well, the character of Eve is not as inferior or subordinated as it would seem. In reality, although she is considered the lesser sex, this allows her to hold some power over Adam. This in turn allows her move away from the role of the subordinated, lesser part of Adam that she is often portrayed in.

Eve is portrayed as the inferior of the pair from the moment she is first created. Adam, who is beginning to feel the effects of his solitude, asks God to create for him a partner that is of his own image: “of fellowship I speak/ Such as I seek…human consort” (8.389-392). God complies with Adam’s wish, and agrees to create another being which he describes to Adam as “thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self” 1. However, although Eve is supposedly Adam’s likeness, and thus his equal, she is created in much different circumstances than her. While Adam was formed from nothing, as a creation of God’s image. Eve, however, was created from one of Adam’s ribs, which God “formed and fashioned with his hands;/Under his forming hands a creature grew,/Manlike, but different sex” 2 . While Adam and Eve were both created by God, Eve is already a lesser creature, for although God’s creation, she was of man/Extracted” 3 , created from Adam, whereas Adam was created directly from God: “He for God only, she for God in him” 4 . The circumstances of their awakenings, as well, seem to imply that Adam is superior to Eve. Adam awakes on soft grasses, with the sun shining down upon him; as he begins to become aware of his surroundings, he is able to view God’s other creations, of “hill, dale, and shady woods and sunny plains,/and liquid lapse of murmuring stream; by these/Creatures that lived, and moved, and walked, or flew,/Birds on branches warbling; all things smiled,/with fragrance and with joy my heart overflowed” 5 . Adam is able to bask in the glory of the earth that God has created, and is immediately able to feel as though he is a part of it, and sense his place within it. Eve, on the other hand, awakens to quite different circumstances. While Adam awakens in the sunlight, surrounded by God’s creatures and beauty, Eve awakens alone, “under a shade of flowers” 6 , left to wonder who she was. While Adam’s surroundings are described in detail, little is known of Eve’s, except that there is a pool of water. It is this pool of water that brings to light several qualities used to emphasize her inferiority, for not only does Eve mistake her reflection for another being, she immediately becomes enraptured by her own beauty. This paints Eve as not only foolish, but also narcissistic and naïve. This view of Eve is what is under heavy criticism, for many feel that Eve has been placed in this role, simply because she is a woman; not only is she a victim of patriarchal society, she is the very first woman to be affected by it, quite simply because she was, in fact, the very first woman.

However, while Eve is indeed seen by some as naïve and narcissistic, it can also be said that the circumstances of her creation and awakening compared to Adam’s did not subordinate her, but rather elevate her to his status. Having being created and awakened on high ground, Adam is able to “see hills, dales, woods, plains, and steams in, apparently, one panoramic view. The effect is one of vastness, which in turn serves to diminish his presence. However powerful and his intelligence and abilities make him, he is only one creature in a large and diverse world” 7. While Adam is indisputably superior to the other creatures God has made, he is, from his very first moments, reminded that he is not the only creation of God, and rather is only a small part, albeit an integral one, of God’s great plan. In contrast to this, Eve’s surroundings “convey a sense of closeness, even enclosure, so that compared to Adam, she looms large on the landscape of Eden. The relative lack of detail in her account suggests that her locale prevents her from taking in Eden at a glance…she seems to fill her world and give it a sense of intimacy that Adam’s Eden lacks” 8. While Adam is at once distanced from his world, Eve’s solitude allows for her to become close to it, and thus become a greater presence than Adam in the long run, and Eve’s “sense of peace and security marks one of the strongest contrasts between their respective nativities, emphasizing Eve’s closeness to, as opposed to Adam’s otherness from, their world” 9. Eve’s response to the pool of water supposedly dictates what is considered to be one of her major flaws, and indeed a fatal ‘feminine flaw’ in general, narcissism. Upon seeing her reflection, Eve becomes captivated with its beauty, and cannot bear to tear her eyes away. This incident is usually portrayed as Eve becoming self absorbed and obsessed with her beauty, yet when in all actuality she quite clearly believes the reflection to be another being. Her response “supposedly denotes a vanity and shallowness that will later make her vulnerable to the serpent’s persuasiveness. To read Eve’s response to her reflection as narcissistic, however, is to misunderstand the limits of her knowledge. Not only does she mistake the water for being another sky, she believes her reflection is another human being. In fact, at no time in this passage does Eve show any interest in or any awareness of herself, other than her initial question of who she might be” 10. While it is usually pointed out that Eve is foolish for thinking her reflection is someone else, as well as her being self absorbed for becoming obsessed with it, she can quite clearly only be guilty of one of those charges. To say that “she is attracted to her reflection is beside the point; the sympathy and love she feels as she gazes into the pool radiate from herself, from a human source, a fact that says a great deal about her moral stature and that bodes well for the human race. Eve is narcissistic, therefore, only in the most technical sense” 11. . While Eve is often portrayed as the character guiltiest of this vanity, very rarely is consideration given to Adam’s vanity, an important aspect of his character, and the way he interacts with Eve. Adam’s narcissism “has a more deliberate character and manifests itself in two ways: through his conscious delight in his body, and in his imaginative construction of a consort and partner” 12. It is Adam who becomes absorbed with his physical appearance- not only does he delight in it upon first awakening, but he gladly recounts the story to Raphael, making sure to extol his virtues. He also asks for a consort from God, who is his equal, and in his image, and he imagines a being as great as he, before Eve is created. Although he loves Eve, and is mesmerized by her beauty, upon first seeing her he cannot help but be a bit disappointed that she is not his exact image, or his equal.

Eve is often shouldered with all of the blame for the fall of Paradise. While it is indeed her that eats the forbidden fruit, from the Tree of Knowledge, thus technically causing man’s fall from Paradise, it is because of her naïveté and vanity, qualities that God gave her, that allows her to be tricked into eating this fruit. Satan, disguised as a serpent, had “wished his hap might find/Eve separate” 13. when he sets out to make Man fall, for he knew that of the two, Eve would be easier to fool. She been warned of temptation or Satan from Raphael as Adam had been, and Satan knew that it would be easy to play up her vanity to lead her into temptation. He indeed uses her vanity and supposed narcissism against her, using flattery to gain his trust. He “[fawned] and licked the ground wherein she stood” 14. , and appealed to her beauty and loveliness. Due to Eve’s feminine flaws, and her naïveté about the world around her, Satan’s appeals to her beauty worked, and he managed to convince her to eat the fruit. Since he could talk, Eve, not being taught any differently, assumed the serpent possessed reason and truth, easily and is easily that there are no repercussions to eating it. Upon a slight deliberation, Eve “forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she ate” 15. , and with this action the fate of humanity was forever changed. Not only were humans expelled from Paradise, but women to be forever persecuted because of Eve’s actions. It is this event that Eve is most infamous, since not only were she and Adam expelled from Paradise, it is because of her action that Sin and Death are released into the world, and humanity must suffer through the ‘real world’ rather than live in Paradise forever. Eve’s inferiority and ignorance are what are most often blamed for her eating the apple, for if she were a man, many believe, she would not have been duped so easily.

While Eve is completely at fault for eating the fruit, what happens afterwards shows that perhaps she is not as naïve, nor as subordinated, as it is made out to seem. While Satan, in disguise, had to lie and manipulate Eve in order to trick her into temptation, Eve does a much faster job in convincing Adam to eat the fruit as well, so that they both fall. She urges him to “taste so divine, that what sweet before/has touched [her] senses” 16 , and appealing her love to him, she convinces him to eat the fruit. Adam, who dreads “to live again in these wild woods forlorn” 17 , soon compiles, and “She gave him of that fair enticing fruit/With liberal hand: he scrupled not to eat/Against his better knowledge, not deceived,/But fondly overcame with female charm” 18 . Milton points out that Adam, the rational and intelligent one, was not deceived, but rather taken in by Eve’s feminine charms, even though he knew better. While Eve is portrayed as being foolish, and was easily tricked into deception, she is able to convince Adam to disobey God, after he has been warned several times, not only by Raphael but God himself not to eat the fruit. This demonstrates that although Eve is in the inferior role, she holds a certain power over Adam that even God cannot transcend, and this power is due to her femininity, rather than in spite of it. The effects of the contrast of Adam and Eve’s awakenings can be seen even here, for while Eve’s leaves her with a sense of peace and belonging, Adam’s “growing awareness that he is unique, and therefore terribly isolated in the silent beauty of Eden offsets the happiness that buoyed him in his first moments of existence. Feelings of discontent and unhappiness, therefore, find their way into Eden through Adam, and not Eve, and he only avoids the sin of disobedience at this point because no one exploits his vulnerability, as happens with Eve” 19. While Eve is the one who receives complete blame for the fall of Paradise, Adam is shown to be capable of the same, and is in fact more quickly and easily convinced. It is shown that although “God may have created Adam sufficient to have stood though free to fall, he also created him with certain instinctual drives that made him inherently vulnerable to temptation and manipulation” 20, and although Eve is the one who first falls, they are equally capable of doing so. Adam and Eve are both naïve, although “the differences between their nativities…indicate that while Eve precipitated the destruction of the earthly paradise, the same or even greater potential existed in Adam” 21. When Satan set out to tempt them, he did not set out solely to find Eve, although it was she who he hoped to find. While Eve was the obvious choice as the easier of the two to corrupt, had Adam been the only one around, Satan would have carried out with his plan, and most likely succeeded. While Adam and Eve are constantly portrayed as two opposites, with Adam being strong and rational and Eve as unique and naïve, it is clear from these events that this is not the case. Although Adam is considered to be much more rational than Eve, he is easily manipulated by Eve’s female charms into disobeying God and eating the fruit. Eve, though naïve, is not so entirely of her own accord, for she has not yet been given the opportunity to grow and learn. Indeed, although Eve does possess a certain naïveté, she not only exudes a certain feminine power over Adam, and knows when and how to use it. Thus, Eve is much smarter and more powerful than she is ever given credit for.

The pattern of Eve’s complete subordination is obvious throughout the entire work of Paradise Lost, and often unfairly so. Since Adam and Eve were created differently, it is impossible for them to become equal, and Adam, as the ‘greater sex’, will always have some sort of advantage over Eve; however, Eve has shown clearly that she is not completely inferior to Adam, and rather that not only are they both more equal than most people would believe, they feed off of each others qualities in order to come together as a unit. While their gender differences allow for a hierarchy of sorts to be created in Eden, Adam’s love for Eve gives her a certain power over him, and thus she can rise above her supposed inferiority, to become, not equal, but almost equal. Just as “God is a superior being to Adam, as Adam is to the animals, and in such relationships, the concepts of power and subordination come into play. The exercise of power, however, seems far from Adam’s mind as he envisions a partner who will dispel the pain of his solitude” 22. Adam does not ask for a partner he can reign over, but instead asks for an equal. He sees animals “rejoice with their own kind…so fitly in pairs [God] hast combined” 23, and he longs for the same. Though Eve is not as subordinated or victimized as much as some critics say, her relationship is not entirely equal; however, the dynamics of their relationship “are not the result of any innate predisposition within [Adam] for power and prestige, but instead a result from his cooptation by a patriarchal authority…the identities of Adam and Eve do not result from any biological engineering on God’s part, but from a type of social engineering that dictates certain roles for each to fulfill.” 24. While this inequality does not stem from the fact that Adam is a man and Eve is a woman, God does give them certain roles to fill, as husband and wife, and inequalities are inevitable. While many would see these supposed inequalities as bad, however, each of their qualities come together to form a whole: “speaking of the relationship between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost…Adam is the reasoning half, Eve the feeling half of their union…although the need for both passion (or emotion) and reason ‘to form a whole being, the circle of perfection’ [is acknowledged]” 25. Due to the circumstances of their creation, these inequalities between Adam and Eve will always exist; Eve was created from Adam, and is therefore a part of him as well as God, whereas Adam is a part of only God. However, although they exist they are not nearly as obvious or important as it would seem, and to “insist, then, on a dichotomy between Eve full of feeling and severely limited in her rational capacity and an Adam who is acting responsibly only when exercising powers of pure reason and command is to overlook their evolving capacity to participate in the other’s being, as demonstrated by Adam’s increasing sensitivity to feelings and Eve’s developing interest in matters of the mind”26. Through their differences and flaws, they unite to become one unit, and “the ideal of human marriage depicted in the central books of Paradise Lost is not either masculinist or feminist, but essentially humanist” 27. Since Adam and Eve are the first man and woman, they are too often looked at simply being male or female, rather than being essentially human, each with their own flaws. While “Adam and Eve are unequal in some ways, [they are] equally free and rational” 28, and to say that Eve is naïve and irrational, while Adam is the opposite, does Eve a disservice, and certainly only takes into account her actions in Paradise Lost, rather than the actions, and interactions, of both Adam and Eve.

From examining Paradise Lost more closely and critically, it is easy to see that while Eve is unequal in some aspects, she is certainly not subordinate to Adam. While Adam, who is closer to God, is obviously seen as superior to her, we can see that she maintains a subtle power over Adam. She uses her feminine charms to her advantage, and although she is portrayed as naïve and imprudent, she is also given certain warmth that, as the mother of all civilization, seems fitting. However, while some inequalities are to be expected, especially considering the time in which this novel was written when women did not have all the rights and benefits that modern women enjoy today, Eve is portrayed somewhat unfairly. While she does indeed possess some flaw, it seems that critics are unable to see past her flaws, unlike with Adam who, although flawed, is portrayed with much more substance. While “Adam and Eve are unequal in some ways, [they are] equally free and rational” 29 , and to say that Eve is naïve and irrational, while Adam is the opposite, does Eve a disservice, and certainly only takes into account her actions in Paradise Lost, rather than the actions, and interactions, of both Adam and Eve. As a whole, Eve is a character whose assets are ignored, while her flaws are magnified, when in reality she is an important and essential character in Paradise Lost. We see, however, that a more critical view of her opens up new ideas to her character, and she is more than just the naïve woman that was tricked into eating the apple, but an intelligent, self aware woman.

References

Langford, Larry L. “Adam and the Subversion of Paradise.” Studies in English Literature 34.1 (1994): 119-134. JSTOR. Vaughan Memorial Library. 5 April 2006 .

McColgan, Kristin Pruitt. “Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in ‘Paradise Lost’.” South Central Review 11.1 (1994): JSTOR. Vaughan Memorial Library. 5 April 2006 .

Milton, John. “Paradise Lost.” John Milton: The Major Works. Eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003.