OCR A2 English Literature, F663/01: Drama & Poetry pre-1800, 6 June 2014

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First unceremonial conversation on earth. Inability to know what the other is going to say.

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“Well thou know’st Eve.”

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Adam represents the nervous voice of the poem’s orthodoxy.

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Eve represents the questioning voice who critiques this orthodoxy.

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Milton lends a certain authority to Eve’s critique; does so by structuring his argument as retrospective of his own career as a radical polemicist.

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Eve takes up the role of the radical Milton. Quoting the younger Milton.

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Eve argues that dividing their labours and working separately they will be more productive.

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Milton has been juxtaposing for years the two accounts of the value of labour he found in the New Testament: the parable of the workers in the vineyard and the parable of the talents. As early as Sonnet Seven (written when Milton was 23 or 24) he was depicting scenarios in which these two parables could be seen to argue with one another on the importance and value of labour. Talents - told Milton he wasn’t working hard enough. Workers - God didn’t require him to work quite as hard. Casts their language in the language of political economy; work.

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We already assume Eve is wrong because we know what happens. Milton attempts to counter these assumptions by allowing Eve to voice her position in the language of the parable of the talents. “Then commune how that day they best may ply / Their growing work: for much their work outgrew / The hands’ dispatch of two, gardening so wide.” Official perspective of the narrator that Eve is to have children. Garden seems to be a lot of work for Adam and Eve. Narrator validates Eve’s initial position in this first speech. Eve suggests when Adam and Eve work together their affection distract each other from their labour. All those intervening looks and smiles “intermits / Our day’s work brought to little, though began / And the hour of supper comes unearned.” Eve has embraced the protestant work ethic. Displays and intuitive grasp of the parable of the talents - God only rewards those who exert themselves or who invest their talent in an activity.

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Adam counters Eve with the parable of the workers in the vineyard that there’s more to work than simple productivity. “For not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us and delight to Reason joined.” For Adam one is still serving God when one is taking pleasure in God’s work. Values willingness to work over the accomplishments.

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Milton makes a distinction between Eve’s zeal for labour and his own efforts in writing this very poem. “Long in choosing but beginning late”. Milton didn’t write this poem until late in his career.

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Beginning early isn’t good enough for Eve. Hard worker.

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Adam doesn’t see the need to work as hard because their work is simply ornamental gardening; they have plenty of food. Gardening is never productive economically.

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Garden is growing at a faster rate than they can manage. “Adam, well may labour still to dress / This garden, still to tend plant, herb and flower, / Our pleasant task enjoined, but till more hands / Aid us, the work under our labour grows, / Luxurious by restraint’ what we by day / Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop or bind, / One night or two with wanton growth derides / Tending to wild.” Eve argues that the garden is growing out of control. She’s examining the effects on nature of culture. It’s growing out of control not because of nature but because of Adam and Eve’s cultural imposition of restraining. If left to itself it may grow at a reasonable rate. Wildness seems to be a result of the unnatural, cultural result to restrain that natural order.

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Imposition of law doesn’t control disorder it produces disorder (in Eve’s opinion)

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Adam claims they can best pass the trial of Satan’s temptation in they’re together. If Adam is there to guide Eve and protect her, the fall is less likely to happen. Eve feels that this is Adam’s attempts to censor her environment. She responds to what she hears to be Adam’s paternal solicitude. “If this be out condition, thus to dwell / In narrow circuit straitened by a foe, / Subtle or violent, we not endued / Single with like defence, wherever met, / How are we happy, still in fear of harm?”. Eve issues a powerful critique of Adam’s act of censorship.

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Eve refuses to accept that Eden may be structured like an authoritarian state like the Stuart monarchy: “Let us not then suspect our happy state / Left so imperfect by the maker wise, / As not to secure to single or combined.” Let’s not imagine we’re unsafe here; whether we are on our own or together. “Frail is our happiness, if this be so, / And Eden were no Eden thus exposed.” …. If Eve’s not able to resist temptation alone then this is not a justifiable world / God.

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When Satan tempts Eve he does so with some version of all of those desires and aspirations that Eden’s hierarchical culture has struggled to suppress.

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First encounter of Eve is the suppression of her admiration of that beautiful image that she saw in the pool; came to be interpreted as narcissism. Admiration was innocent because Eve had no way of knowing that was her own image.

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“Fairest resemblance of thy maker fair, / Thee all things living gaze on, all things thine / By gift, and thy celestial beauty adore / With ravishment beheld, there best beheld / Where universally admired.” Eve’s affection for a sympathetic gaze was denied to her; suppression seemed to have produced in her a self love. Satan knows this.

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Milton tries to show human development in general.

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Eve doesn’t have a mother; role of the mother that has systematically excluded. Satan tempts Eve with that natural instinct that has been denied to her: “A goodly tree far distant to behold / Loaden with fruit of fairest colours mixed, Ruddy and gold: I nearer drew to gaze; / When from the boughs of savoury odour blown, / Grateful to appetite, more pleased my sense / Than smell of sweetest fennel, or the teats / Of ewe or goat dropping with milk at even, / Unsucked of lamb or kid, that tend their play.” Strange simile. Comparing the smell of the forbidden fruit to the milk of the mother. Eve was mothering herself; Adam tells Raphael of her self-containment in Book 8 “When I approach / Her loveliness, so absolute she seems / And in herself complete.”

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Satan argues that one of the effects of the fruit was the power of reason and speculation: “Thenceforth to speculations high or deep / I turned my thoughts, and with capacious mind / Considered all things visible in heaven, / Or earth, or middle, all things fair and good.”

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Eve is tempted by the possibility that she is Adam’s equal. Raphael’s denial of their equality in Book 8; desire for equality leads Eve to eat the fruit - hopes that it will produce an equality with Adam. “Look on me, / Me who have touched and tasted, yet both live, / Meant me, by venturing higher than my lot.” Basically saying by eating this fruit Eve will be able to come greater than her lot in life permits.

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“But to Adam in what sort / Shall I appear? Shall I to him make known / As yet my change, and give him to partake / Full happiness with me, or rather not, / But keep the odds of knowledge in my power / Without copartner? so to add what wants / In female sex, the more to draw his love, / And render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior; for inferior who is free?” It becomes clear one of the primary reasons Eve falls is because of the hierarchal order of the Miltonic paradise.

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“Up they rose / As from unrest, and each the other viewing, / Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds / Now darkened; innocence, that as a veil / Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone, / Just confidence, and native righteousness, / And honour from about them, naked left / To guilty shame.” First act of sexual intercourse after the fall. Self-consciousness “their minds / Now darkened”.