Feminism Regained: Exposing the Objectification of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT

This project reopens John Milton’s Paradise Lost with a view to better understanding Eve’s culpability in the biblical fall of human kind. Through the process of this reopening, Eve’s day-to-day life within Milton’s Paradise is assessed anew using contemporary feminist critical methods that expose her triple objectification at the hands of God, Adam and Satan, in an environment of widespread and entrenched sexual inequality. It will be shown that the contemporary nature of these observations work to reposition Milton’s Eve as an agitated unequal, thereby allowing for an amelioration of the high level of culpability traditionally attributed to her actions in Paradise. The Nussbaumian approach to objectification analysis taken in this project marks a break from recent historicist trends that have analysed Eve within Milton studies during the last two decades. Using a more comprehensive method of close analysis that encompasses not only Eve’s Paradisal context (landscape, infrastructure and inhabitants), but also the scenes of her creation and temptation, this project accounts for most layers of Eve’s life. It is argued that from this position we are in a much better position to challenge the judgements—divine or otherwise—that Eve’s actions within Milton’s Paradise have attracted through time.

Acknowledgement

The author would like to acknowledge and thank Associate Professor Justin Clemens and Dr David McInnis for providing valuable feedback on many drafts of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All quotations from PL are cited parenthetically by book and line number from the 2005 Norton edition.

2 From the mid-1990s to present.

3 Nussbaum.

4 Instrumentality, when a person treats another person as a tool for her or his purposes; denial of autonomy, when a person treats another person as lacking autonomy or self-determination; violability, when a person treats another person as lacking boundary integrity, that is, it is permissible to break up, smash or break into; ownership, when a person treats a person as something that is owned or can be bought or sold (ibid., 257).

5 It has already been seen that commentators infrequently invoke the term object to describe Eve—a “direct object” of Satan's hostility (Evans, 230), “more than an object of [Adam's] physical desire” (Pruitt, 53), an “object for [Adam's] love” (Turner, 238)—but this term is never fully explained or tested in a way that supports its use in their critiques. The effect of using the term “object” in this way implies that the audience already knows the kind of treatment that is assumed when the objectification of Eve is briefly flagged as problematic.

6 Maggie Kilgour pays “homage and fealty” to “the life and work of John Milton” in her introduction to Their Maker's Image: New Essays on John Milton (Fenton and Schwartz, 14). Diane K. McColley confesses in religious tones to feelings of “communion” during the composition of Milton's Eve (vii). Both imply a form of reverence for their lord John Milton that corroborates Fallon's remark that “no wonder … Milton and Milton Studies have been scandals in the contemporary academy. If Roland Barthes famously announced three decades ago the ‘death of the author’, Milton is one author who has resolutely refused to die” (xi).

7 Belsey; Froula; Nyquist; Schwartz; and Swan.

8 Froula, 336.

9 Ibid.

10 McColley; Lewalski.

11 Nyquist, 172.

12 Ibid., 172, 171, 174.

13 Pruitt, 111.

14 Ibid., 46.

15 Ibid., 53.

16 Schwartz, 93.

17 Ibid., 99.

18 Interdonato, 98.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 99, 101.

21 Daphne, Flora, Narcissus, Pomona, Proserpine and Pygmalion.

22 Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria.

23 Green, 921–2.

24 Ibid., 911.

25 Ferry; Polydorou; Pruitt; Sumers; and Miller.

26 Speght was the first woman to contribute a theological critique of Eve during the infamous pamphlet war in Milton's time known as the querelle des femmes (quarrel about women).

27 Polydorou, 30.

28 Ibid., 23–24.

29 MacKinnon, 535.

30 “Heaven's all-powerful King” (2.851); “Ethereal King” (2.978); “Eternal King” (3.374); “all-bounteous King” (5.640); “invisible King” (7.122); “Universal Lord” (5.205).

31 “Messiah King” (5.664); “King Anointed” (5.777); “rightful King” (5.818); “Heaven's Lord supreme” (2.236).

32 Poole, 555.

33 Pruitt, 126 (emphasis added).

34 Silver, 282.

35 Ibid., 283.

36 Ibid., 283–4.

37 The name Milton's divine muse takes at this stage in the narrative.

38 Lenhof, 15.

39 Ibid., 16.

40 Ibid.

41 Daly; Pagels.

42 The Gospel of Thomas 114, written 40–140AD and discovered late in 1945, provides evidence of systematic privileging of the male sex in the establishment of Christian authority:

Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Pagels, 294).

43 Metamorphoses, 1. 514–15; Green, 916.

44 Pruitt, 25.

45 Spender, 25.

46 Nussbaum, 264.

47 Ibid.

48 Evans; Turner; Forsyth; and Kilgour.

49 Evans, 46.

50 Green, 918.

51 Rudat, 8.

52 Shakespeare, 233–4.

53 Liebert, 161.

54 Carr, Moffitt and Syzmanski, 21.

55 Ibid., 14.

56 Speech excerpt from UN Women executive director Phumile Mlambo-Ngcuka 20 September 2014 “It has been suggested that the single greatest threat to a woman's health is men … of all women killed in 2012, almost half were killed by intimate partners or family members” (UN Women).