Milton on Women—Yet Once More

Responding to a feminist study of Paradise Lost in terms of sociological role definitions, this article asserts the limitations of such analyses in assessing the true complexity of Milton's literary treatment of women, and the universality of the poem's concerns. Far from being relegated to an exclusively or primarily domestic role, Milton's Eve participates fully in the entire range of prelapsarian human activities–education, working in and sharing responsibility for the human environment (the garden), discussing and analyzing new experience, exercising her powers of symbolization in naming the plants, composing love poetry and divine praises. Milton's portrayal of the first marriage reflects his abiding belief (articulated emphatically in his divorce tracts) that the prime end of marriage as defined in the Genesis story is human companionship, not progeny or the relief of lust. Most important, despite his acceptance of the commonplace of Eve's inferiority to Adam in the natural hierarchy, Milton structured the temptation episode to manifest that she, like the Lady in Comus, was “sufficient to have stood.” What is profound and enduring in Milton's treatment of the first man and woman is his recognition, on the one hand, of the capacity and responsibility of each to make crucial individual decisions defining his or her life, and on the other, of the depth and intensity of their need for each other to give that life human shape and to make it endurable.