John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a text that focuses on its characters’
need for other beings. The reasons that define this necessity are
various. Adam seeks a companion “fit to participate / All rational
delight” (8.390-391). He desires a being that can reciprocate intellectual
discourse and therefore dispel his sense of loneliness. Satan’s need for
others is manifest first in the text with his desire for sovereignty over the
demons in hell; however, Satan also demonstrates that he needs Adam
and Eve to avenge his expulsion from heaven. By coaxing humanity to
his fallen state, Satan gains sympathy: after the fall, Adam begins briefly
to identify with the rebel angel, whose situation Adam thinks most
closely resembles his own. In cases such as Adam’s and Satan’s, the
need for other beings is consistent with a narcissistic impulse: characters
want others to resemble and reflect back their own conditions: fallen or
otherwise.
Eve disrupts this pattern in the text by exhibiting autonomous
contentment at her actual reflection, not one derived from another
being. From this moment in the text, Eve is instructed as to her
marginality in the Father’s hierarchy: Adam experiences God; Eve
experiences Adam, who acts as an intermediary between her and God.
Eve does not have a direct relationship with God and is merely a mirror
of Adam. Therefore, she is not supposed to experience the kind of
narcissism that inspires Adam to request a companion that resembles
himself. The divine hierarchy’s negation of Eve’s significance leaves
her with a lingering concern for autonomy that makes her vulnerable to
Satan’s temptation, which offers her an autonomous connection to the
universe and a place as the center of attention; after the fall, Eve
submits more willingly to her imposed marginality and offers Adam the
fruit in a state of desperate attachment and loss of individuality that she
had not exhibited hitherto in the text.
Eve’s marginal role in the divine hierarchy is presented
immediately upon her introduction in the text. Milton states: “For
contemplation he and valour formed, / For softness she and sweet
attractive grace, / He for God only, she for God in him” (4.297-299).
According to divine edict, Eve’s experience is filtered through Adam.
Her circumscribed need for others or her desire for her own reflection
is to be experienced only through Adam. The narrator is already hinting
that Eve should not possess an autonomous contentment with herself
nor a tendency towards independent action.
Eve’s birth narrative further solidifies the sense that unlike
Adam, who rhetorically determines his needs in direct converse with
God, her narcissistic needs and desires are dictated to her. As the
narrator has explained to the reader that Eve is “for God in [Adam],”
so, too, does an authoritative voice explain this to Eve. When Eve feels
that she might forever pine “with vain desire” at her own reflection
of “answering looks / Of sympathy and love” (4.464-465), the voice
intercedes:
What there thou seest fair creature is thyself,
With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
Thy coming, and thy soft embraces, he
Whose image thou art, him thou shall enjoy
Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear
Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called
Mother of human race (4.468-475)
The voice instructs Eve that what she sees is merely herself, an
insubstantial shadow. She is also instructed to follow the voice to Adam
who is the original of which she is only an image. Paradoxically, Eve is
told both that she is a shadow and an image while being urged to Adam
for “soft embraces” or physical contact. Her independent substantiality
is denied while her substantiality in relation to Adam’s caresses is
affirmed. Eve is denied autonomous narcissism because her creation
was predicated on another being’s narcissistic desire for an “equal” like
himself. Therefore, she is not supposed to experience an independent
reality or physical existence outside of Adam’s gaze. She is the shadow
of a shadow: Adam is more godlike because he was created to mirror on
earth the Father’s divine authority; Eve is created to satisfy Adam’s need
for a companion. The voice attempts to cut Eve off from autonomy,
put her into Adam’s sense of her status as his image, and tells her that
motherhood is the proper outlet for her narcissistic desires. She will bear
multitudes like herself and “be called / Mother of human race.” Eve is
constructed by the voice as a being who exists only for Adam and her
offspring.
Eve’s verbal submission to her imposed marginality as
constructed by the voice of divine edict is evident early in the text;
however, her continued openness to autonomous modes of existence
signifies less than total psychological submission and a tendency towards
individuality. In Book IV, Eve reflects on the beauty of Paradise as
experienced with and through Adam:
Nor grateful evening mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight without thee is sweet.
But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom
This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes? (4.654-658)
Eve seems to be conforming to the role she has been assigned. She
denies that the various aesthetic pleasures of Paradise would continue to
please her without Adam. Adam is her intermediary in her relationship
with God and the universe. Yet, Eve’s inquiry as to why the stars
continue their display when unobserved indicates a preoccupation with
autonomy. Eve naively supposes that everything functions only for
her and Adam’s pleasure; however, she also shows a lingering concern
for existence outside of their perception and experience. Perhaps she
cannot conceive of the stars shining independently because this luxury
is prohibited to her. She may be questioning why the stars are allowed
an autonomous existence outside of Adam’s gaze while she is confined
to a reality that is constructed by his perception of her.
Satan is able to seduce Eve in her dream because of her
discontentment with her marginal status as the object of Adam’s gaze,
which is represented by her lingering feelings about experiencing reality
autonomously. Satan plays upon Eve’s sense that there is a realm of
beauty independent of Adam’s gaze. Satan calls Eve to experience
reality in the following terms:
now reigns
Full orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; heaven wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, nature’s desire,
In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze. (5.41-47)
Satan draws Eve’s attention to the fact that the beauty of night exists in
vain if not appreciated. He then creates the sense that the beauty exists
because it is heaven’s eyes trying to see Eve’s own beauty: she is “nature’s
desire.” Eve is pulled out of her reliance on Adam to appreciate her
beauty and brought back into the direct contact with the nature that
she experiences at the lake. Satan allows her to experience autonomous
feelings of desire and being desired. In her sight, “all things joy.” Eve is
both the object of a universal gaze and the observer. She is not merely
an image but an independent entity who is capable of participating in a
reciprocal exchange of desirous gazes and reflections with the universe.
In a way similar to the dream temptation, Eve is also
precipitated into the actual temptation by Satan’s manipulation of
her perceived deficiencies as instituted by the divine hierarchy. Satan
continues to call Eve’s attention to a realm of beauty outside of Adam’s
gaze [while] suggesting that her relationship with God is direct. She is
no longer a shadow or image but an autonomous being permitted to
have its own narcissistic desires for itself. Satan addresses Eve:
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; but here
In this enclosure wild, these beasts among,
Beholders rude, and shallow to discern
Half what in thee is fair, one man except,
Who sees thee? (And what is one?) Who shouldst be seen
A goddess among gods, adored and served
By angels numberless, thy daily train. (9.538-548)
Eve is now the “fairest resemblance” of her maker, as opposed to
merely Adam’s resemblance. Adam is no longer an intermediary
connecting her to God. Furthermore, she no longer needs only Adam’s
gaze to reflect back her own beauty. She can have an autonomous
experience of her beauty similar to the lake incident; however, in this
scenario, the whole universe and all the angels will reflect back her
beauty. Instead of the negation of narcissism that Eve experiences
as Adam’s image, she will now experience infinite narcissistic desire
for herself through all living and spiritual beings reflecting her beauty
back to her. Satan reconstructs Eve’s identity and brings her into
immediate contact with the universe she had previously been instructed
to experience through Adam’s perception only. It is Eve’s marginal
status that facilitates the efficacy of Satan’s revolutionary discourse. He
offers unadulterated experience and desire that is directed towards Eve
for reasons other than her being an image of another being. In Satan’s
scenarios, the whole universe is the image of Eve’s beauty rather than
her being the mirror of Adam.
Her fall and subsequent fear of death immediately creates in
Eve a loss of individuality that is consistent with that which has been
ingrained in her consciousness throughout the text. Upon reflecting on
her ensuing death and Adam’s union with another partner, Eve states,
“Confirmed then I resolve, / Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe:
/ So dear I love him, that with him all deaths / I could endure, without
him live no life” (9.830-833). Eve has shown her predisposition to be
able to live without Adam in both the lake incident and her susceptibility
to Satan’s seductions. She was previously able to conceive of realms
independent of Adam’s perception. She is now consumed by a selfish
desire to destroy Adam along with herself because she can no longer
conceive of separation from him. Though Eve previously professed
her inability to find delight in Paradise without Adam, she exhibited
the possibility of such an existence apart from Adam imaginatively
in her question about the autonomy of the stars. Her fear of death
has reduced her to the kind of dependence on Adam that the divine
hierarchy requires: total submersion of identity. There is no longer
a reality independent of Adam because Eve is anxious about the
tenuousness of her own existence. She is clinging to that which she has
been instructed. Like Eve’s own fall, Adam’s is similarly facilitated by
the incongruities in the divine order. Eve’s circumscribed position as a
“weaker” being makes her vulnerable to a temptation that points out the
constructed nature of this position; her circumscribed dependency
on Adam affects her reaction to the crisis of her own demise.
Eve’s secondary nature in Paradise Lost influences the course of
events to a remarkable degree. There is the Father’s sense that the cause
of the fall is Adam’s failure to see the true nature of Eve’s marginal
position; however, one may argue that Eve’s predetermined role in the
text causes the fall by its failure to compensate for all of her needs and
desires. Eve is paradoxically expected to exist as an image and a shadow
while having free agency in her actions. She is also the character in the
text who is supposed to be determined to the greatest extent by what
others tell her about herself. Adam is given the opportunity to discover
his own desires and argue with God for a companion; Eve’s attempt at
discovering her own desire is rebuked by a voice that tells her that she
is merely another’s image and desired object. It is the lack of the divine
order providing an adequate sense of identity and autonomy to Eve that
precipitates both her and Adam to the fall.
Work Cited
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Ed. Alastair Fowler. Harlow,
England: Longman, 1998. |