“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669the scientific orthodoxy of the moment cannot explain the ways of God and the
order of things for all time. As he makes Adam aware of his inevitable limitations in
astronomical science, Raphael emphasizes that Adam’s primary attention and care
should be given to human life and the human world: “thy being,” “this Paradise /
And thy faire Eve” (8.170–4).
At the center of his epic, Milton set a richly imagined representation of prelapsarian
love, marriage, and domestic society.^138 It is a brilliant though sometimes conflicted
representation, in which Milton’s internalization of contemporary assumptions about
gender hierarchy, his idealistic view of companionate marriage, his own life expe-
riences, and his deeply felt emotional needs sometimes strain against each other.
Most profoundly, he explores through Adam and Eve the fundamental challenge of
any love relationship: the uneasy, inevitable, and ultimately creative tension be-
tween autonomy and interdependence.
In a sublime epithalamion, Milton celebrates marriage as the foundation of hu-
man society, and also gives his representation of Edenic marriage political reso-
nance as he contrasts Adam and Eve’s joyous and fulfilled marital love with the
sterility and licentious indulgence of “Court Amours” – Charles I’s cavaliers and
the Bacchic “revelers” of Charles II’s Restoration court:
Haile wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source
Of human ofspring, sole proprietie
In Paradise of all things common else.
By thee adulterous lust was driv’n from men
Among the bestial herds to raunge, by thee
Founded in Reason, Loyal, Just, and Pure,
Relations dear, and all the Charities
Of Father, Son, and Brother first were known...Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights
His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings,
Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile
Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard,
Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours
Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal. (4.750–68)This paean elides female relationships: no mention is made of mothers and sisters,
though the Bard implies, with modern anthropologists, that these social bonds are
forged through women. He also imagines Adam and Eve’s archetypal marriage
according to the forms of the early-modern institution, as an arrangement betweeen
the father and the husband which the woman is to accept or (in rare cases) de-
cline.^139 After brief resistance Eve accepts the husband offered by God the Father
and the role prescribed for her: to produce “multitudes like thy self,” and to be for
Adam “an individual solace dear” (4.449–91).