“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669Miltonic Bard insists that she both delighted in and was fully capable of that knowl-
edge and would obtain it later in discussion with Adam – thereby gaining the edu-
cational benefit of dialogic interaction that Adam enjoyed with Raphael (8.48–50).
Milton portrays Eve as an accomplished reasoner and debater in the marital dispute
in Book IX and underscores her intellectual “sufficiency” in the temptation scene
by her wry response to Satan’s fulsome flattery and her precise statement of the terms
of the prohibition as a divine command outside the law of nature.
Milton also accords Eve important areas of initiative and autonomy that further
qualify patriarchal assumptions. Both before and after the Fall Eve often proposes
issues for discussion, initiates action, and leads in some new direction. She first raises
questions about the order of the cosmos; she proposes the proto-capitalist idea of
the division of labor to help meet the problem of the garden’s burgeoning growth;
she first responds to “prevenient grace” and makes the first motion to repentance;
she proposes suicide or sexual abstinence to prevent visitation of the Fall’s effects on
all humankind. When their dialogic interchanges are working properly, Adam re-
sponds to, develops, and where necessary corrects Eve’s initiatives, as Raphael does
Adam’s, to advance their common understanding. In the realm of literary creativ-
ity, Eve constructs the first autobiographical narrative as she recounts her earliest
recollections – with the implications autobiography carries of coming to self-aware-
ness, probing one’s own subjectivity, interpreting one’s own experience, and so
becoming an author (4.449–91). She is as much a lyric poet as Adam, perhaps more
so. Their hymns and prayers are joint expressions, but Eve creates the first love lyric
in Eden – the delicate, rhetorically artful, sonnet-like pastoral that begins “Sweet is
the breath of Morn” (4.641–56). And if Adam brought this lyric form to higher
perfection in his aubade echoing the Song of Songs (5.17–25), Eve after the Fall
perfects the tragic lyric. Adam’s agonized complaint, “O miserable of happy” (10.720–
862), ends in despair, while Eve’s moving lament, “Forsake me not thus, Adam”
(10.914–36), opens the way to repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
Also, Milton brings the ideology of gender hierarchy up against the characters’
different experiences and psychology. Eve and Adam offer very different autobio-
graphical accounts of their creation, first encounter, and marriage, accounts that
evidently reflect Milton’s reading of female and male psychology. Eve tells of con-
structing herself first through pleasurable self-contemplation, which she mistakes as
a response to another female “shape,” and then by freely accepting a marriage
relationship; but she does not express any need for completion by another. She
recounts as an episode “oft remembered” (4.449–91) how she woke on a flowery
bank in some wonderment about herself, and how she then followed a murmur of
waters to a pool that reflected a female image bending toward her as she to it “with
answering looks / Of sympathie and love” (4.464–5). As a version of the Narcissus
myth, Eve’s story suggests her potential for self-love, but in most respects she is
defined against the Narcissus story. She did not remain fixed forever, enamoured of
her watery image, but after listening to the arguments of God and Adam, freely