The first thing Eve remembers after she was sprung full-created from Adam’s rib is wandering over to a smooth lake and fixing her eyes on her own image with vain desire and the picture staring back at her with sympathy and love. But soon a voice in her head, presumably God’s, tells her to make her way over to find him whose image thou art and sure enough awaiting her under a tree is the man to whom she must be subordinate: Adam,
Fair indeed and tall; yet methought less fair
Less winning soft, less amiably mild, than that
Smooth watery image; back I turned
At least he’s tall. However she’s not impressed, and she turns to walk away, maybe back to gaze on that beautiful reflection. But Adam yells out, “return fair Eve” and explains to her how she was formed from his flesh, his bone, the rib nearest to his damn heart. Because of that, she owes him her presence and subordination. Here’s how Eve explains it,
…thy gentle hand
Seized mine, I yielded, and from that time see
How beauty is excelled by manly grace
And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.
Her natural inclination is not to think Adam is better in any way. She has to learn forcibly (check the language of force: seize; yield) that he is actually fairer: which she seems to acquiesce to in this passage, but don’t forget that Eve, here, is narrating to Adam how they met, and so if she actually had any heretical thoughts, they would only slide through in slivers.
There’s another character who shows more transparent difficulty with a very similar kind of thrall: Satan. Who was the fairest angel in all of heaven and don’t even wanna accept that God created him:
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
And he laments that if maybe he was just,
Some inferior angel, I had stood
Then happy; no unbounded hope had raised
Ambition.
What Satan is pissed about (and pissed is an understatement; he sacrifices all his beauty fulgence eminence for this principle) besides the tedious pomp of God’s dominion is that already he owed supplication to God the father, something he can’t fathom cause they were equally free as God, if not equal in power and splendor (remember, Milton was part of the coalition that supported the beheading of King Charles), is that all of a sudden, when everything in creation seems static and done, God decides he’s gonna make Christ to have a true full reflection of his glory, and Satan just can’t abide this nepotism,
Knee-tribute yet unpaid, prostration vile,
Too much to one, but double how endured,
To one and to his image now proclaimed?
So he rebels, heaven wars, Satan’s smited (not by virtue of righteousness but he is defeated cause he’s simply not powerful enough, God & Christ are just stronger). Honestly, the war of heaven is the most tedious part of what I think is an awesome propulsive fun epic. The only other bad parts is when Milton is going crazy with the allusions and you’re just like what the fuck are you going on about,
Of Phelgra with the heroic race were joined
That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban
Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebizond
Or whom Bizerta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell
By Fontrabia.
Yes, if this passage don’t accurately show, after Milton left college he spent five years at his dad’s house reading all the Latin and Greek writers (obviously not in translation). Love to imagine his daughters’ faces as they took dictation from his blind supine ass (cause Milton was blind and kinda exiled with life and property threatened as he worked on this poem, going to bed nightly where Homer’s muse would thrust the verses fully formed into his head and he would wake up and spew them off to whomever was around to write it down, a duty often falling on his daughters).
There is that OD allusiveness, and a syntax that is crazy contorted but that sometimes he takes to the extreme like in this passage of Adam & Eve vibing, eating in Eden,
The savory pulp they chew, and in the rind
Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream;
Nor gentle purpose, nor endearing smiles
Wanted, nor youthful dalliance as beseems
Fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league,
Alone as they.
Which is part of the reason the modernists turned on Milton early in the 20th century (Eliot most vehemently, though he eventually changed his mind), arguing that his influence was pernicious on poetic style. When a sui generis artist becomes very popular their influence almost always leads to cringe bullshit cause the style is inimitable: it wouldn’t work if anyone else did it. You can see this easily and clearly with some like Eminem in hip-hop. His descendents are mostly corny and trash. But every once in a while somebody comes along that is strong enough to transform that peculiar influence into something if not better than at least equal to like Melville did with Milton and Kendrick did with Eminem.
Anyway. We can see most clearly what Satan thinks of himself when he takes the form of the serpent and tempts Eve. Of course, it’s hard not to think of Ulysses when considering Satan and his address to his shipmates in Dante,
Consider well the seed that gave you birth;
you were not made to live your life as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.
And the epithet Homer applies to his hero: polytropos. He’s a many-styled many-turned wily cunning experienced duplicitous long-suffering motherfucker. Satan, who now knows well that he’ll never defeat God with power, must rely on his cunning: one of the many attractive features of Satan in the poem. The others being his persistence, his democratic inclinations, and his clear-thinking Shakepearean bars, like him here thinking about his postlapsarian state,
Be then his love accursed, since love or hate,
To me alike, it deals eternal woe.
Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will
Chose freely what it now so justly rues.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.
But that’s still him on his woe-is-me shit. I really think Satan glimpses the situation in the garden of Eden very clearly, and the reason he targets Eve is not because she is weaker in wisdom and discernment, but it’s because he sees her subjugated by Adam in the same way Satan himself was subordinate to God. He gets her. And so he speaks to her with a logic that makes sense to him (under the guise of a talking serpent),
Fairest resemblance of thy maker fair,
The all things living gaze on, all things thine
By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore
With ravishment beheld, there best beheld
Where universally admired; but here
In this enclosure wild, these beasts among,
Beholders rude, and shallow to discern
Half what in thee is fair, one man except,
Who sees thee? (and what is one?) who shouldst be seen
A goddess among gods, adored and served
By angels numberless, thy daily train.
And is this not a tempting logic? It is the same logic by which God rules over his Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers: He is the most absolutely glorious being in the universe and so he wants everybody to adore and serve him; going so far as to create humans after the fall of Satan’s legion just for some extra adoration. But I don’t think Milton is critiquing God. Rather, his argument is that the most powerful and glorious being in the universe deserves complete adulation and obedience; and if you serve an inferior resplendance, you’re a fucking dunce.
So it seems like Eve falls due to Satan’s wiles. But I don’t think she really gets tricked. Like when the serpent is telling her that the fruit Adam and Eve are forbidden from eating (an obedience test from their great forbidder (as Eve calls him)), she goes,
Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt
The virtue of that fruit, in thee first proved:
But say, where grows the tree, and hence how far?
She knows he’s bullshitting her, but she wants to transgress. She’s been looking for a way to have more freedom ever since Adam forcibly reoriented her gaze from herself in the lake to him. As she says when she eats the fruit, she wants it to,
Render me more equal, and perhaps,
A thing not undesirable sometime
Superior; for inferior, who is free?
And her program of incipient freedom really begins when Satan induces a dream in her in book 5. He whispers in her ear while she’s sleeping and she dreams that she eats the fruit, and when she wakes up and tells Adam, he’s obviously unhappy,
Nor can I like this uncouth dream,
Of evil sprung, I fear.
Because he’s supposed to be in domination of her, yet here he gets a glimpse of her secret life away from him: a mysterious world where she is envisioning transgressions. From that point on, too, she does everything she can to be alone without him. Culminating in the morning of the fall when she insists that they split up to do their chores (which seems to be plucking big juicy fruits off the big juicy trees) and they go back and forth (for all his supreme wisdom and reason, Adam comes off intellectually inferior when dealing with Eve) and finally she says, arguing against his point that she shouldn’t go out alone because there is an evil force in the garden trying to make them transgress,
And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed
Alone without exterior help sustained?
Let us not then suspect our happy state
Left so imperfect by the maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined
Frail is our happiness if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden thus exposed.
And she goes out alone and eats the fruit. One of the most affecting things about the epic is that Adam and Eve really do love eachother. Eve does not wanna be alone in her newfound post-fruit splendor,
Confirmed then I resolve,
Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
So dear I love him, that with him all deaths
I could endure, without him live no life.
Adam comes to meet Eve with a garland he wreathed for her in his hand, and she tells him everything that happened and he turns pale, astonished and horrified, and the garland falls to the ground. Our poor simp Adam cries out,
O fairest of creation, last and best
Of all God’s works, creature in whom excelled
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote?
Rather how has thou yielded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred fruit forbidden! some cursed fraud
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruined, for with thee,
Certain my resolution is to die.
And he eats the fruit, too. So, the big threat was that if they ate the fruit, they would die. But they don’t die. Actually, they get pretty lit and lusty. Eve’s eye starts darting contagious fire and they fuck until dewy sleep oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play. But of course, after any night of hard intoxication and animalic nastiness, the next morning is extraordinarily miserable. Immediately,
They sat down to weep, not only tears
Rained at their eyes, but high winds worse within
Began to rise, high passions, anger, hate,
Mistrust, suspicion, discord, and shook sore
Their inward state of mind, calm region once
And full of peace, now tossed and turbulent.
For the first time, bad feelings have entered the world. And Christ comes down and finally hands them their punishment. They’re gonna have to labor hard to earn their grain, childbirth will be painful, and worst of all: they and all their descendents will now die. Adam does not take it well, he goes on a several page rant where he sounds like Job,
All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,
Is propagated curse. O voice once heard
Delightfully, Increase and multiply,
Now death to hear! for what can I increase
Or multiply, but curses on my head?
And of course he turns his harangue to Eve whom he blames for everything,
Fooled and beguiled, by him thou, I by thee
To trust thee from my side imagined wise,
Constant, mature, proof against all assaults,
And understood not all was but a show
Rather than solid virtue, all but a rib,
Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears
Nothing but a rib! he calls her. But Eve drops down to her knees and proclaims her love for him, begs him to forgive her. Because now she realizes that her yearn for freedom was not worth all the pain and strife she brought into the world. And she loves Adam. She didn’t want to hurt him. She just didn’t want to be his peon! But as she is clutching onto his legs, Adam flexes, for the first time, his exemplary wisdom and reason and shows her grace,
But rise, let us no more contend, nor blame
Each other, blamed enough elsewhere, but strive
In offices of love, how we may lighten
Each other’s burden in our share of woe.
The transgression is irrevocable, but now it’s time to love and forgive and continue. Which inspires a response from Eve that leads to one of the most radical passages in all of literature. She is solution oriented. Death is still hanging over their heads and the heads of their hapless seed, so she says, let’s not have kids,
Childless thou art, childless remain: so death
Shall be deceived his glut, and with us two
Be forced to satisfy his ravenous maw.
But, she continues, careening toward her real idea, if to endure their whole lifespan without having sex (love’s due rights; nuptial embraces sweet, she says) seems impossible for him,
Then both ourselves and seed at once to free
From what we fear for both, let us make short
Let us seek death, or he not found, supply
With our own hands his office on ourselves;
Why stand we longer shivering under fears,
That show no end but death, and have the power,
Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,
Destruction with destruction to destroy.
What Eve is suggesting here is that she and Adam should commit suicide in order to save their progeny from hell and death and pain. Now Milton seems to realize how outrageously radical this is because he has Adam say (though Adam wouldn’t know the full implication of this),
Eve, thy contempt of life and pleasure seems
To argue in thee something more sublime
And excellent than what thy mind contemns
What is sublime and excellent here is that she is arguing that they perform Christ’s sacrifice. To in full freedom take on death in order for humanity to be saved. But this, of course, would be a perverse re-imagining of Christ’s sacrifice. Eve, here, is the only person in creation who could actually stick it to God. Satan wishes he could do something like this. Because if Adam and Eve destroy themselves, then Christ’s existence is superfluous, and he doesn’t get to perform the act that would justify his sitting at the right hand of the father. Of course, Adam doesn’t have the stomach for something so absolutely perverse and sublime. And he suggests that they prostrate themselves to God in contrition, and water the ground with their tears, right in the same spot Christ judged them,
with tears
Watering the ground, and with their sighs the air
Frequenting, sent from hearts contrite, in sign
Of sorrow unfeigned, and humiliation meek.
God accepts their contrition, but decides they can no longer live in Paradise and sends Michael to evict them. And Adam and Eve, forever bonded in their transgression, our lingering parents, are weepfully pushed from their first home by the militant Michael, but they walk out together, a solitary union against the rest of creation,
They looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.