John Milton's Eve Research Paper

Complicating Milton’s Eve: Justifying the Ways of God to Man, and the Ways of Man to Women While the Biblical creation story is just one in a diverse cannon of creation mythologies and superstitions which have informed various cultures throughout history, for John Milton and the Christian faithful of his time the Bible served as a powerful social tool, accepted as historical fact and employed to justify societal conventions, describe natural phenomena, and clarify a meaning for life. Throughout his life and the litany of his works, John Milton sought to understand the great truths of his world through rational observation and analysis, applying his dialectic lens to understand faith, reason, and human nature through a philosophy of binarism.

God endows Adam with wholesale sovereignty "over the fish and fowl of sea and air/Beast of the field, and over all the earth" (7. 521-22). Resembling the sagacious God who invents and christens his Creation, Adam inherits the power to name all other occupants of Eden; his “tongue obeyed and readily could name/What e'er [he] saw" (8. 272-73). Likewise, he instantly and with divine wisdom sees and comprehends wholly the value, the purpose, and the constitution of that which he names. Adam explains, "I named them, as they passed, and understood/Their nature, with such knowledge God endued" (8. 352-53). Adam comes to language perfectly and instinctively, not through gradual and laborious study, but through impeccable wisdom granted by God. The text therefore privileges access to language, and by extension knowledge, to the essential male. Moreover, for a poet in a patrilineal English society which privileges the father’s claim to naming his wife’s newly born children, Adam's naming certainly denotes his authority over that which he names, including of course women. Names and naming in Paradise Lost represent a masculine privilege of naming which makes whole the birthing process, in much the same way that Christian infant baptism and christening with the paternal family name ceremonially marks a child’s birth and solidifies the newborn’s paternity. Of woman’s naming, Adam exclaims, “I now see Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, my self/Before me; woman is her name, of man Extracted” (8. 494-97). Like the naming of the animals, Adam’s naming of Eve is ripe with hierarchical, political consequences. The naming ritual empowers Adam to translate his abstract authority from a concept into tangible history, inaugurating male governance over language, knowledge, the natural world, and women. The act of naming confirms Adam’s power