Eve, dear Eve. Who wouldn’t fall in love? As she makes the decision not to eavesdrop on Raphael and Adam while they’re discussing the stars so as to grant her husband the heroic opportunity later on to answer all of her sweet little questions. The wooing scene between these first parents is so funny as to be almost played for laughs: Eve comes to consciousness and immediately finds herself taken with her own reflection in a lake. She’s quite content there, until a voice (presumably God’s) sends her to Adam, “fair and tall indeed” but “less fair / less winning soft, less amiably mild.” Unimpressed, she turns around, ready to get back to her lake. Adam calls out, makes a proposal-like plea, and, she tells him, “I yielded.” This moment is but one crumb in a cyclical trail of crumbs in Paradise Lost: Is Eve free—or even in charge—because she is the agent making all of the decisions about her submission to Adam? Or is her decision to be supplicant to be understood as a straightforward statement of her inferior position?
Eve deserves better. Milton’s women, and not only Eve, are so alive on the page; they can be witty, comely, unruly, sensual, wily, contradictory—in a word, irresistible. Such rendering does not happen by mistake, though one must stand firm in the face of temptation to present Milton as engaged in any effort on behalf of women. I have watched transfixed in seminars as well-meaning young scholars contorted themselves into complicatedly bad arguments that Milton is a feminist. Sometimes evidence is to be taken at face value; “he for God / she for God in him” says enough. But the women are too irresistible to leave alone: the Lady of Comus, Eve of Paradise Lost, Dalila of Samson Agonistes, each is their own contained theory about the female experience, often measured against the power of men. Milton’s tract arguing in favor of divorce granted on the grounds of incompatibility, for all of its problems, is a radical and finely crafted document on the subject.
Milton was married thrice. His first wife, Mary Powell, was a teenager when she (was) married (to) the thirty-something Milton in 1642. This went badly almost immediately. The accepted conjecture is that the political situation in England created painful tension between Milton and Mary’s father (a royalist), and Mary ran away from her new husband within the first month or so. Though she eventually would return and remain his wife until her death while giving birth to their third daughter in 1652, this was not, it seems, a nice marriage. There was another woman, about whom little is known besides the fact that she is credited with being the muse who inspired his 1643 tract The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: Restor’d to the Good of Both Sexes, From the Bondage of Canon Law. His subsequent marriages were both perhaps happier relationships: Katherine Woodcock would die by childbirth after a couple of years, and his “third and best wife” was Elizabeth, thirty-one years his junior.
This all to illustrate that while it is difficult to conjure a John Milton particularly sensitive to the nuance of gender relations, there is little room for doubt that he was for much of his life preoccupied with the inner lives of the women around him—probably against his preference. His friendships (all with men) were largely positive and, in being so, placid. Who can blame him for coming up with an easily sketched, admirable, and very boring Adam? He was too busy working out what do to about Eve.
At first sight, she is untamed, with “her unadornèd golden tresses” all “dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved / as the vine curls her tendrils” and worn as a “veil down to her slender waist.” Theologically loaded, those ringlets. They suggest that woven into Eve’s fabric is the thread of sin, and we can know as much from that beguiling, wanton hair—and her fabric, of course, cut from the same cloth as Adam’s. The word shows up again in the climactic scene when Satan appears as a serpent, “his torturous train / curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, / to lure her eye.” Is there in this the treacherous villainy of womankind or redemption? She did not choose to listen to Satan and share around that apple—she simply could not do otherwise. Milton’s Calvinist sympathies slot in neatly. Calvin wrote in his Institutes: “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at His own pleasure arranged it.” The Fall is not about a fundamental shift in humanity’s relationship with God as it is about the unfolding of events that must, and were always going, to happen; innocence lost so that it can be regained. In this way Eve is but a handmaiden to Adam and to God, setting up the circumstances for salvation, neither empowered nor belittled. (In a way, much the same could be said of Satan.) And thus in the great, blundering catastrophe of the Fall, Milton created a perfect wife.
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is a blistering document, written when Milton was in his early thirties and newly married for the first time. His argument about divorce is essentially thus: For the state to grant divorce simply because a couple doesn’t get along (today called “no-fault”) is not only a more justly liberal policy, but the right and Christian thing to do. I cannot make excuses for Milton in this tract. He is petulant and angry. But the project to rigorously articulate a spouse to whom one feels spiritually close stays with him for decades, and at the moment of their deepest failure the first couple is closer than ever. Eve promises Adam that if they are together there is no leaving Eden: “with thee to go / is to stay here.” Paradise was never about doing the right thing. It is a happy fall. This is an epic, not a tragedy.
Adam and Eve leave the Garden hand in hand, “providence their guide.” Was it not always to be? It matters no more which of them is in charge. She’s done the critical damage, but by her “the promised seed shall all restore.” Would Milton believe that after everything she’s done, Eve deserves to be happy? Well pleased, but answered not.