“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669agreed (“I yielded”) to reject narcissism, to share love and companionship with
Adam in marriage, and to create human society – living images, not watery reflec-
tions. Eve’s story also presents a classic Lacanian mirror scene: initial symbiosis with
maternal earth and water in a place of pleasure before language, then a rupture
when God’s voice (the Law of the Father) intervenes, leading her to a husband and
thereby into language and culture.^142 She at first turns away, finding masculine
Adam “Less winning soft, less amiablie milde, / Then that smooth watry image”
(4.479–80), but he wins her as his mate by urging his “paternal” claim to her as well
as his ardent love. Eve, however, complicates the reading of her story as a simple
submission to patriarchy.^143 As she recounts the words spoken to her by God, she
almost concludes that God made Adam for her, not vice versa, and that he insti-
tuted matriarchy, not patriarchy:
hee,
Whose image thou art, him thou shalt enjoy
Inseparablie thine, to him shalt beare
Multitudes like thy self [not, like himself], and thence be call’d
Mother of human Race. (4.471–5)Moralizing her story, Eve claims to have learned from the first events of her life
“How beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom, which alone is truly fair”
(490–1). On one reading this seems to be a forthright testimony to male superiority
in mind and body. But on another, Eve hereby proclaims (after a brief homoerotic
hesitation) her heterosexual attraction to Adam’s “manly grace” over female beauty,
and then distinguishes wisdom from both physical qualities, implying that it may
pertain both to Adam’s and her own self-knowledge and wise choices.
Adam’s narrative (8.355–99), by contrast, testifies to a psychological and emo-
tional neediness that in some ways undercuts gender hierarchy and recalls Milton’s
similar testimony in the divorce tracts.^144 Adam reports his initial attempts to dis-
cover who he is by contemplating nature and his immediate inference that “some
great Maker” created both it and him. Then he recounts his eloquent pleas with
God for a mate, emphasizing his keen sense of incompleteness and loneliness with-
out an “equal” companion. Recounting the courtship event he explains Eve’s hesi-
tation not as she herself did but by projecting onto her a serene consciousness of
self-worth, “That would be woo’d, and not unsought be won,” and a demeanor of
“obsequious Majestie” in accepting his suit (8.500–10). He underscores the conflict
between ideology and experience by emphasizing the disconnect between what he
“knows” of Eve’s inferiority to him and what he experiences when he is with her:
when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in herself compleat, so well to know
Her own, that what she wills to do or say,