Milton’s Domestic Heroism and The Separation Conversation in Paradise

Lost Book 9
Thomas H. Luxon
Dartmouth College

speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem

deveniunt. prima st Tellus et pronuba Iuno
dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius Aether
conubiis, summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae.
ille dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit

To the same cave come Dido and the Trojan chief. Primal earth and nuptial Juno give the sign; fires
flashed in heaven, the witness to their bridal, and on the mountain-top screamed the Nymphs. That
day was the first day of death, that the first cause of woe. (Aeneid 4.169-170)1

No more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast, permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam'd: I now must change [ 5 ]
Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience: On the part of Heav'n
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, [ 10 ]
That brought into this World a world of woe. (Paradise Lost 9.1-11)2

In book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid, the narrator imagines the coming together, the pseudo-marriage of Aeneas and Dido as

the cause of epic woe and death; in John Milton's Paradise Lost the separation of the first wedded pair sets the stage

for the epic event that "Brought Death into the World, and all our woe" (Paradise Lost 1.3). In the opening lines of

book 9, Milton tries to plant Aeneas and Dido in his readers' minds as a template upon which and against which to

think about Adam and Eve and their first acts of disobedience. When Milton's verse succeeds in bringing Aeneas

and Dido to mind, our reading of the separation conversation in book 9 becomes richer and our understanding of

Milton's imagination deeper.

Book 9 opens with a radical re-consideration of what counts as epic heroism. Martial and athletic prowess,

along with mythic and fabled battles and even erotic relations between gods and humans must give way, he asserts,

to something "more heroic": patience and martyrdom (PL 9.14-32). But we have read the story in Genesis, we know

the story of the fall, so we find ourselves wondering which act of Adam or Eve in the story of the fall and its

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aftermath illustrates heroic patience or martyrdom? Maybe Milton's point is to celebrate these newly-minted,

hitherto unsung heroic traits by calling attention to their absence in this story. Perhaps, since book 9 is tragedy,

we're invited to regard the narrative of original sin as illustrative of missed opportunities for heroic patience and

martyrdom.

In his recent book, Delirious Milton, Gordon Teskey points out what many have thought but few have said

about the heroic theme of Paradise Lost: the poem offers a redefinition of epic heroism as "Patience and heroic

martyrdom," but without actually telling, at any length at least, a story of heroic patience and martyrdom. What is

"true heroism for Milton,” says Teskey is "not… the subject of Paradise Lost."3

It is one point of this paper to disagree with Teskey’s last statement here and to recruit your disagreement as

well. I have no quibble with his definitions of Miltonic patience and heroic martyrdom, only with his claim that

they are not the subject of Paradise Lost. They are, but just as the poem is about how Paradise came to be lost, so

the poem redefines epic heroism by showing us two lost opportunities—what it takes to be the first lost

opportunities—for such heroic action. At the crucial moment of what we now call the separation conversation in

book 9, Milton imagines an Adam who loses patience and then, after Eve transgresses, passes up an opportunity to

offer his un-fallen self to a martyr's death in her place. Milton invites us to imagine, for a fairly extended period, a

heroic act that would have obviated the need for a "second Adam" to redeem mankind. Adam would have redeemed

his fair spouse himself. At least this is what I believe Milton meant us to contemplate. This reading has remained

unavailable to modern readers and critics until recent accounts of English Protestantism have reminded us just how

radical Puritan thought became in the mid-17th century. Deborah Shuger, Nigel Smith and, more recently, Joanna

Picciotto have helped us to understand just how marginalized the “figure of the crucified Jesus” and “the doctrine of

substititionary atonement” had become in the increasingly secularized theology of radical religion. 4 Milton, we

recall, left his poem on the passion unfinished and published it that way in the 1645 Poems. He claimed that

“Learning” could be effective “to repair the ruines of our first Parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of

that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true

vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection,” without saying a thing
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about atonement. And Paradise Regain’d depicts a second Adam regaining paradise by obedience and patience
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first, leaving martyrdom merely anticipated. Piciotto has shown us how “Miltonic constructions of the public absorb

the second Adam into the first” (9); I wish to show how Milton adapts the Genesis story to prompt us to imagine an

Adam who might have rendered Christianity as we know it unnecessary.

But I have one or two other points to make in this paper as well—points that require setting up some

contexts. Let’s take a look at the lines that open book 9, before we look more closely at the poet’s contempt for

classical heroism.

NO more of talk where God or Angel Guest

With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us'd

To sit indulgent, and with him partake

Rural repast, permitting him the while

Venial discourse unblam'd: I now must change [ 5 ]

Those Notes to Tragic; foul distrust, and breach

Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,

And disobedience: On the part of Heav'n

Now alienated, distance and distaste,

Anger and just rebuke, and judgement giv'n, [ 10 ]

That brought into this World a world of woe, (PL 9.1-11)

The opening line reminds us that for the preceding 2751 lines—since line 361 of book 5—the poem has narrated

Adam’s conversation with the archangel Raphael, a conversation that has ranged over many topics, including topics

“hitherto heroic deem’d”: the war in heaven, the creation of heaven and earth, Satan’s journey to earth,

cosmological speculations, Adam’s long conversation with God about a fit partner, the establishment of the Garden

state.” Milton has enclosed (and by doing so, re-valued) classical epic themes—war, epic journey and wiliness, even

marriage and state-founding—within the confines of an occasional post-prandial conversation, albeit one with an

angel.
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In my last book, Single Imperfection: Milton Marriage and Friendship, I argued that Milton struggled to

re-define marriage on the model of classical friendship doctrine. Across his four divorce tracts, two versions of The

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and The Judgement of Martin Bucer concerning

divorce, Milton argued strenuously against the persistence, in a reformed Protestant state, of Roman Catholic

definitions of marriage and proscriptions against divorce. Marriage was not, he argued, principally about

procreation, and not at all about the “avoidance of sin”; it was instituted by God in creation as a conversation:

For … God in the first ordaining of marriage, taught us to what end he did it, in words expresly

implying the apt and cheerfull conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against

the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a

secondary end in dignity (DDD in CPW 2.235)

Now I wish to add to that argument the following claim—that in re-defining heroism for a reformed nation, Milton

designates the field of married conversation, rather than a battlefield or an empire, as the appropriate arena for truly

heroic action. For Milton, true heroism is domestic. Or it should have been from the beginning. It should have

begun at home in the Paradise Adam and Eve continually constituted by their married conversation, across all the

senses of that word. Had Adam proved “not less but more heroic,” the subsequent versions of heroism celebrated in

classical epics, need never have come into being.

However, Milton begins book 9 with the words, “NO more of talk.” This locution taunts us with many

possibilities. Some may be tempted to hear this: “The time for talk is over, now we shall have action, heroic action,

however tragic.” If we hear this, it is because we have not listened well to Raphael’s repeated injunctions that Adam

be lowly wise and re-focus his attention on Eve and their garden paradise. Adam has enjoyed talking with Raphael

because it makes him feel like he is already in heaven (PL 8.210), a state of being not to be had without long

process of obedience and love, temperate diet and gardening, especially the cultivation of self with self and selves

with place, but Raphael repeatedly reminded Adam to turn his attention homeward:

joy thou

In what he gives to thee, this Paradise

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And thy faire Eve; Heav'n is for thee too high

To know what passes there; be lowlie wise:

Think onely what concernes thee and thy being; (PL 8.170-74)

Adam’s conversation will one day be in heaven, but for now it should be on earth with Eve. However, we may by

anticipation hear something else here—no more of the extended talks between God and Man or Angel Guest and

man—a return to the conversation that constitutes Paradise: that of Adam with Eve? If that is what we’re meant to

hear, why then is it so tragic? Before I get into a close reading of this “separation conversation,” let me turn our

attention back to Milton’s brief descriptions of classical heroic actions.

Milton's narrator calls specific attention to the classical heroes Achilles, Odysseus and Aeneas, but not, as it

happens, to their virtuous acts so much as to their heroic wrath and rage, inviting us to regard Achilles's "wrauth,"

Turnus's "rage," Neptune's and Juno's "ire" as the central heroic stuff of classical epic (PL 9.14-19). Milton, I have

no doubt, had a much richer reading of classical epics than these lines suggest. This appears as a sort of heuristic

reductionism that sets the virtues of Christian heroism in stark contrast to “pagan” values. We might be tempted for

a moment to see Odysseus and Aeneas here as exemplars of patience, putting up with Neptune's and Juno's petty

retribution, but the pettiness of the gods' ire reduces the heroism of their patience to almost nothing, and we quickly

remember that neither the Odyssey nor the Aeneid is really about heroic patience, let alone martyrdom.

But Milton has called these three classical heroes to mind in his effort to re-define what counts as human

heroism, and in the case of Aeneas, at least, the effect is very strange. Milton's narrator identifies two heroic themes

from Virgil's Aeneid—Turnus's rage and Juno's ire, ignoring Aeneas's pietas, martial prowess or (almost)

unwavering pursuit of his imperial destiny. The Aeneas pictured here is the target of epic rage, not its subject. And

Turnus's rage, we are reminded, was for being "disespous'd" of Lavinia. This reminds us of Aeneas at perhaps his

least heroic—waxing complacent in what Charles Martindale calls an “unholy marriage” contracted by passion and

blessed only by Juno’s desire for indirect revenge on her husband, Jupiter (133).6 Ashamed by Mercury's charge that

he has subordinated his own imperial destiny to the re-building of Dido's kingdom, he even more shamefully

prepares to leave Carthage without so much as a fare-thee-well. Wedded bliss is un-heroic in Virgil's epic, and
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Milton wants to establish marriage as the site of his new heroism. Virgil may invite us to see Aeneas heroically

divorcing Dido, but Milton forces upon us another interpretation. He is setting us up to see epic grandeur in an

unlikely place—Genesis 2-3, a story that he knows looks far more like some petty domestic misunderstanding

driven by fears and jealousies and what even Diane McColley admits look a lot like "hurt feelings" and issues of

"unsettled self-esteem" in Paradise.7 Milton's epic, after all, has marriage at its center; fit conversation, wedded

bliss, married love and obedience—these activities the poem advances to epic status.8 Raphael tells the blest pair

that obedience, patience and love are the paths to heaven and heavenly love:

love refines

The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat

In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale

By which to heav'nly Love thou maist ascend (PL 8.589-92)

In order to promote such domestic and quotidian themes to epic status, Milton resorts to putting traditional heroic

themes in a bad light. Other traditionally heroic activities in the poem—creation, battle, athletics and empire

building—appear reserved to non-human beings, angels and especially devils (see PL 2.528-628). For human

beings, obedience, patience and martyrdom are the only properly heroic activities; aspiring to godlike heroism is

sin. Adam and Eve's separation conversation engages us both directly and obliquely with questions about precisely

these things.

Everything in the poem has been pointing to this moment. We have read eight books and thousands of lines

since book one's opening promise to tell the story of how "First Disobedience/ . . . Brought Death into the World,

and all our woe" (PL 1.1-3). How different this is from that crucial moment in book 4 of the Aeneid when, driven by

Juno's storm and prompted by Venus's trickery, Aeneas and Dido find themselves together in a cave and engage in

the pseudo nuptials that bring on "the first day of death, that the first cause of woe" (Aeneid 4.170). From a Miltonic

vantage, this sounds like hyperbole, mocking the false epic proportions of Dido's tragedy. This is about her death

and her woe, not Aeneas's or ours. In fact, Aeneas's destiny requires her woe and all but requires her death. In

Dido's arms, says the poem, Aeneas is a lover "forgetful . . . of nobler fame" (Fairclough 411). Their epic love looks
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anti-heroic. Jove sends Mercury to warn Aeneas to stop building Carthage, stop being "a wife's minion," and get

back on the track of his heroic destiny (Fairclough 415). This "marriage" is not epic heroism, it is epic disaster.

Paradise Lost insists that marriage is the proper sphere of human heroism, not its enemy. Or we might say

that Adam's marriage to Eve has potential both ways—epic heroism or epic disaster. Milton means us to recall

Zeus's commission of Mercury to visit Aeneas and urge him to break it off with Dido. In Paradise Lost the Father

sends Raphael in part to warn him once more about disobedience, but he also teaches Adam that married love is the

key to his destiny, and that it is possible to mismanage his love for Eve and thereby lose all:

Accuse not Nature, she hath don her part;

Do thou but thine, and be not diffident

Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou

Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh,

By attributing overmuch to things [ 565 ]

Less excellent, as thou thy self perceav'st.

For what admir'st thou, what transports thee so,

An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well

Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love,

Not thy subjection: weigh with her thy self; [ 570 ]

Then value: Oft times nothing profits more

Then self esteem, grounded on just and right

Well manag'd; of that skill the more thou know'st,

The more she will acknowledge thee her Head,

And to realities yield all her shows: [ 575 ]

Made so adorn for thy delight the more,

So awful, that with honour thou maist love

Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.
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But if the sense of touch whereby mankind

Is propagated seem such dear delight [ 580 ]

Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf't

To Cattel and each Beast; which would not be

To them made common and divulg'd, if aught

Therein enjoy'd were worthy to subdue

The Soule of Man, or passion in him move. [ 585 ]

What higher in her societie thou findst

Attractive, human, rational, love still;

In loving thou dost well, in passion not,

Wherein true Love consists not (PL 9.561-89)

Raphael's message to Adam is so much more complicated than Mercury's to Aeneas because married love here is

not an alternative to epic heroism, it is supposed to be the proper sphere of heroism. Get married love right, says the

poem, and death and woe haven't a chance. Get this wrong and death and woe will trouble marriage and all human

relations until the advent of "one greater Man/ Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat" (PL 1.4-5). And getting this

right, as we know from Milton's divorce pamphlets, is all about fit conversation.9

Fit conversation requires much of Adam: a proper sense of self-esteem, a dispassionate appreciation of Eve’s

“outside,” worthy of cherishing, honor and love, but not “subjection,” a perfect temperance with regard to sensual

pleasure (“touch”), and a carefully cultivated appreciation Eve’s “higher” and rationally “human” qualities which,

after all, a properly temperate man should find more attractive than “touch” or mere “outsides.”10 Conversation

across sexual difference is not easy, says Milton. And nothing demonstrates this more subtly than the separation

conversation of book nine.

In the Aeneid, there is no separation conversation; Aeneas gets the ships ready immediately after hearing

Mercury, taking no time to talk things over with Dido. When the lovers do talk, it is hardly "fit conversation." Dido

shouts imprecations and threatens to kill herself while Aeneas says simply, it's not my choice but the gods'; they're
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making me leave you against my will. Until this point the poem never shows us Dido and Aeneas in conversation,

at least not what Milton regards as fit conversation. Even in the nuptial cave, there's no talk, just sex, what Virgil's

Rumor calls "wanton ease" (luxu) and "shameless passion" (turpique cupidine). To call Aeneas's relations with Dido

a conversation is to use the term in what Milton regarded as its most degraded sense, as a euphemism for sex,

especially illicit or adulterous sex (see the OED's 3rd sense). This is precisely the sense of the word Milton believes

“ignoble and swainish minds” like that of the anonymous answerer to his first divorce tract will always hear when

they speak of conversation.11 This is the sense of the word he tries so hard to scrub away when he defines marriage

in the divorce pamphlets as a conversation between fit partners. Milton invites us to read this episode, Aeneas's

leaving Carthage, as a divorce—an annulment of exactly the sort of marriage that he argued divorce was supposed

to remedy: a non-marriage —a good man yoked to an unfit partner because of a bad choice.

What a stroke of brilliance that Milton should so subtly call Aeneas and Dido to our attention as he sets

before us Adam and Eve deep in conversation! And this conversation in book 9 might well be regarded as the most

interesting of all their conversations in the poem, because this is the first conversation that involves direct

disagreement. In that first conversation in book 4 Adam suggests they retire to bed and Eve replies, "Unargu'd I

obey":

My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst

Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains,

God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more

Is womans happiest knowledge and her praise.

With thee conversing I forget all time,

All seasons and thir change, all please alike. (PL 4.635-40)

In their second conversation, Adam "clears" her mind and conscience from Satan's dream assault. In this episode,

the one we call "the separation conversation," Eve takes the unusual role of being the first to propose a course of

action; she then argues with her husband's gentle demurral and her obedience comes sharply into question. Why?

What makes this conversation so different?

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Diane McColley did Milton criticism a favor when she patiently and thoroughly demolished the misogynist

hermeneutic heritage (virtually a folk tradition) that read the Bible's Eve (and thus Milton's Eve) as "fatally frail or

obstinately perverse before the temptation begins" (McColley 3). She showed clearly that Milton's imagined Eve

directly challenges the popular misogyny that blamed the first woman, and by extension all women, for the advent

of death and woe in this world. But McColley was mistaken to insist that we regard Milton's Eve, and Adam for that

matter, as not just sinless but absolutely "righteous and … spiritually engaged in the process of perfection until the

moments of their respective falls" (187). This overstates things in the other direction, insisting that Milton's first

wedded pair appear thoroughly error-free right up to the moment of disobedience, thus rendering that moment of

disobedience forever inexplicable. Reading Milton's Eve this way requires us to ignore or explain away much of

what makes Paradise Lost, especially the separation conversation in book 9, the brilliant poem it is.

We can agree, I hope, that Milton imagines in this poem "an Eve who is imaginative and rational, sensuous

and intelligent, passionate and chaste, and free and responsible" without insisting that she expresses temperate virtue

"in everything she does until the moment when Satan's lies 'into her heart too easie entrance won'" (3). After all, if

this were so, she would not need Adam to clear her heart of doubts following the evil dream she reports in book 5;

her tears of "sweet remorse" would make no sense (PL 5.134). Milton asks us to imagine that Eve can have real

cause for remorse without sinning; erring is not disobedience.12 Likewise, if Adam is incapable of serious error why

send Raphael to warn him, especially to warn him about unhealthy passions for the charms of outward female

beauty and sexual pleasure?

Joan Bennett gracefully corrects such overstatements when she reminds us how committed Milton is to

regarding Eve as a weaker vessel, even to the point of showing her practicing a mode of logic less sharp and quick

than Adam's (Bennett 111-12). Bennett's reading allows us to see a couple experiencing "unsettling passions,"

making errors in deduction, straying from prudence and failing in wisdom. In Bennett's reading, Adam's parting

words, "God towards thee hath done his part, do thine" (9.375) cannot be read as identical with "Milton's summons

to his reader" (McColley 3, 218), but rather as Adam's greatest sinless failure, "one of the most fascinating moments
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in the poem, in which Milton gives complex recognition to the necessarily precarious nature of an antinomian

liberty of conscience" (Bennett 117). Eve's sufficiency to stand necessarily includes Adam's "exterior help," and

Adam was wrong, petulantly and disastrously if sinlessly wrong, to close off conversation and debate and order Eve

to "Go" not once, but twice, the rapid repetition serving to cover his own doubt (or something else?) with a false

ring of conviction and an inappropriate tone of command (9.372-73). This reading returns to us the complicated

characters Milton imagined and the variety of alternatives the poem invites us to consider.

Bennett suggests that both Adam's and Eve's errors have their roots in "psychological pressures" and

"passions" without dwelling on what these might be. She says Adam bends over backward "to avoid being

authoritarian" (116) and that Eve "feels an urge toward independent action and a greater personal efficiency than is

possible, or necessary, or desirable in the prelapsarian balance" (111). But why, we should now ask, does Eve feel

this urge toward independence and why does Adam bend over backward (always a dangerous posture) both

physically and emotionally?

To begin to answer these questions, I propose a closer look at the separation conversation, a conversation

proposing to end, or at least interrupt, the married conversation that for Adam and Eve constitutes Paradise and the

proper means for pursuing their destiny—eventual reunion with the Father in heaven (PL 5.497-503). What

prompts the "first thoughts" Eve shares with Adam in book 9's separation conversation? The prelude to Eve's

proposal recalls Adam's bedtime homily from book four when even as he made the case for following nature's will

and night's bidding, he noted that the garden's "wanton growth" presented quite a challenge to the "pleasant work"

of "reform," and so required an early rising (PL 4.622-29). Here in the separation conversation Eve echoes Adam's

earlier words, but with some subtly different tones:

Adam, well may we labour still to dress

This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour,

Our pleasant task enjoyn'd, but till more hands

Aid us, the work under our labour grows,

Luxurious by restraint; what we by day

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Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,

One night or two with wanton growth derides

Tending to wilde. (PL 9.205-212)

The "pleasant task" of gardening, says Eve, is "enjoyn'd." Eve characterizes the work of lopping and pruning as

"restraint" rather than "reform." These are small differences that would hardly demand attention but for something

more disturbing: Adam characterized the work of reforming wanton growth as a challenge that can be met by early

rising; Eve almost suggests the task is futile because their pruning work appears to cause "luxurious" growth. A

day's work on one plant can be undone in just one night, or maybe two, of herbal wantonness. She even ascribes

mildly malign intentions to the plants—they "deride" the gardeners' work. Adam also endowed the garden with

intentionality. The branches "mock," he says, their "scant manuring," meaning perhaps that they grow faster than

should be expected given the minimal tillage they receive (4.628). But here Eve describes a garden potentially

rebellious, not mocking the gardeners' shortcomings, but deriding their very efforts at restraint by nightly growing

more "luxurious." To be sure, this is not yet The Little Shop of Horrors, but Eve's imagination takes a step in that

direction.

Stanley Fish, in the last chapter of How Milton Works, does an especially fine job of detailing the

misconceptions, misunderstandings and ironies of Eve’s proposal.13 She fails to understand work as a gift of human

dignity, not an injunction enforced by the threat of unearn’d supper. She imagines having enough hands to get the

work done, when of course the whole point to their gardening, like the point of their wedded conversation, is the

process, not the product. Obeying God, loving each other and long conversation will lead one day to heaven almost

by accident, but such thoughts, warned Raphael are as yet “too high” for contemplation. Paradise is a process—

gardening, eating and fit conversation—not a product. But Fish never asks what motivates such misconceptions.

Wasn’t Eve the one who seemed naturally to intuit, without instruction, that her place was in the garden amongst

her flowers, rather than talking cosmology with the archangel? Fish allows us to infer that Eve’s misconceptions are

simply her peculiar intellectual shortcomings. I will show how Milton meant us to see them as motivated by the
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occasion. Likewise, Fish reads Adam’s passive aggressive response to Eve as coming “from nowhere” (540),

from “out of the blue” (541). I don’t think so.

Adam and Eve both describe, of course, the same garden. Especially noteworthy, they both agree that the

"pleasant work" requires "more hands" (4.629 and 9.207). On that score, they speak in unison. What accounts,

though, for Eve's image of a slightly more rebellious, more anxiety-producing garden? I suspect we’re meant to see

Eve projecting new concerns about herself, especially herself as Adam sees her, onto her plants and flowers,

concerns that have arisen since she left Adam alone with Raphael deep in conversation. We begin to get a sense of

these new concerns, even though Eve never makes them explicit, in the "first thoughts" that follow.

Let us divide our labours, thou where choice

Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind

The Woodbine round this Arbour, or direct

The clasping Ivie where to climb, while I

In yonder Spring of Roses intermixt

With Myrtle, find what to redress till Noon:

For while so near each other thus all day

Our taske we choose, what wonder if so near

Looks intervene and smiles, or object new

Casual discourse draw on, which intermits

Our dayes work brought to little, though begun

Early, and th' hour of Supper comes unearn'd. (PL 9.214-25)

Two words, along with the echoes they evoke, haunt our reading of this speech: "intermixt" and "intermits." They

echo each other, but also the narrator's careful explanation in book 8 of why Eve walked away from Adam and

Raphael, preferring to hear later from Adam whatever bits of Raphael's discourse he wished to share with her. No

anxiety surrounded that earlier separation scene, or if we readers were anxious, the narrator allayed our concerns by

saying:
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Yet went she not, as not with such discourse

Delighted, or not capable her eare

Of what was high: such pleasure she reserv'd,

Adam relating, she sole Auditress;

Her Husband the Relater she preferr'd

Before the Angel, and of him to ask

Chose rather: hee, she knew would intermix

Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute

With conjugal Caresses, from his Lip

Not Words alone pleas'd her. (PL 8.48-57)

Eve is not, as traditional misogynists might have thought, unfit for such discourse. If she chooses to visit her flowers

and save the pleasure of such conversation for later, alone with Adam, that marks her as an especially fit partner for

Adam. Because she walks away, even as her husband and the angel are too absorbed to see her go, she does not hear

Raphael's gentle rebuke to Adam: "be lowlie wise:/ Think onely what concernes thee and thy being" (8.173-74). But

we understand that here she displays a fitness not only for Adam, but for the place they share in the garden; even

better than Adam at this point, she knows their place in creation.14 But most important for understanding the book 9

conversation, the narrator tells us that Eve looks forward to a later conversation with Adam that will include kisses,

caresses and other "Grateful digressions" intermixed with "high dispute." In book 8 we understand she separates

from Adam in order to make possible a later conversation that intermixes physical sensuality with learned discourse.

Why then do her "first thoughts" later (as we hear them in book 9) prompt her to recommend a course of action that

will avoid precisely such intermixed conversation? What has happened between Eve's return "at shut of Evening

Flours," and now (9.277)? The first pair's wedded conversation has traveled some distance between "intermix" and

"intermits." The intermixed pleasures of conversation she once saved for later she now speaks of as threatening to

intermit their "task enjoynd." What has prompted this change from delightful anticipation to unsettled anxiety?
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Eve leaves a clue that critics seem reluctant to follow. Diane McColley comes close to tracing it out when

she calls attention to Eve's reference to what she "overheard" of Raphael's discourse with Adam when she returned

from her time alone with the flowers as narrated in book 8.15

That such an Enemie we have, who seeks

Our ruin, both by thee informd I learne,

And from the parting Angel over-heard

As in a shadie nook I stood behind,

Just then returnd at shut of Evening Flours.

But that thou shouldst my firmness therfore doubt

To God or thee, because we have a foe

May tempt it, I expected not to hear. (PL 9.274-81)

McColley thinks Eve refers to a single line from Raphael's valedictory reminder to Adam that human beings, both

male and female, are sufficient without "outward aid" to withstand the enemy's temptations and this forms "the

premise of the rest of Eve's argument," an argument McColley finds error-free, convincing and approved by Milton

(McColley 171). The line McColley pulls out of context here is, "Perfet within, no outward aid require;/ And all

temptation to transgress repel" (8.640-41). If Eve began her eavesdropping only at this line and overheard none of

what Raphael spoke before, then we are dealing with a woefully misinformed Eve who mistakes Raphael's

reassurances about Adam's self-sufficiency as applying also to her.

Critics from Joan Bennett to William Poole (including myself) have argued convincingly that the poem

cannot support such an interpretation.16 The poem means us to regard Eve as less inwardly perfect than Adam. Her

beauty is the outward physical expression of Adam's inward "manly grace/ And wisdom which alone is truly fair"

(PL 4.490-91). She learned as much from Adam and from the "voice" who warned her "What thou seest,/ What

there thou seest fair Creature is thy self" (4.467-68). Moreover, it was a lesson that required some physical coercion
 16
before Eve yielded: "thy gentle hand/ Seisd mine, I yielded, and from that time see/ How beauty is excelld by

manly grace/ And wisdom, which alone is truly fair" (4.488-91). Later, Raphael urges Adam to

weigh with her thy self;

Then value: Oft times nothing profits more

Then self esteem, grounded on just and right

Well manag'd; of that skill the more thou know'st,

The more she will acknowledge thee her Head,

And to realities yield all her shows (PL 8.570-75)

Eve may be sufficient to withstand temptation, but everything we have heard from the archangel, the narrator and

from the angel-corrected Adam, even from Eve herself (4.440-43, 9.383) indicates that she is the weaker vessel, not

Adam's equal in wisdom, and wisdom is the best tool in their kit when it comes to this enemy's threat, for in this

instance the danger lies, says Adam, “within” (9.348). No, Milton wants us to see that Eve is wrong to argue for

separation here and Adam is wrong to end the conversation before he has set her straight. Indeed, if all the lopping

and pruning and manuring really does promote wanton growth more than it reforms it, working separately and thus

more diligently cannot possibly succeed. In other words, Eve is wrong even in the premise upon which she builds

her faulty argument. If she were not upset about something else, she might have realized this. If Adam were not so

perturbed by her hurt feelings, he might have helped her to see her mistakes. What they need most at this point is

precisely the conversation Eve looked forward to when she walked away from Adam and Raphael. Conversation is

their marriage, their Paradise and their heroic fortitude in the face of evil. Adam felt he was in heaven while

conversing with Raphael (8.210); conversing with Adam is in much the same sense Paradise for Eve. When she

walks away this time she walks away from Paradise because she walks away from conversation when conversation

is most necessary, more necessary than any gardening. They should talk until they understand better what motivates

Eve's novel desire for independence and Adam's impatient and self-centered fit of pique.
 17
So what is Eve upset about and what did she hear, besides the archangel's parting admonition, that might

have prompted her to set aside her desire for conversation with Adam? Her stated concern—that intermixed

digressions (8.54-55) may intermit (9.223) their work—cannot be her real concern. The premise—that lopping and

pruning makes make things worse, not better—makes the proposal—we shall get more pruning done working

apart—nonsense. Also oddly suspicious is Eve's suggestion that Adam choose where he wishes to work (9.214-15),

so long as he is sufficiently separate from her that conversation, even smiles, cannot intermit their efforts. From

what Adam says it is clear he will choose, if he could choose, to remain close to her. In book 8 we were reminded

repeatedly that any eyes that witness Eve's "winning graces" must "wish her still in sight" (8.61-62, and see 8.43).

Had Adam, or Raphael for that matter, seen her walk away, they would have desired her instant return. Given such

graceful "darts of desire" Adam cannot possibly wish for Eve to work apart from him, so her proposal must be not

only illogical, but positively painful to him. It would require him to let her walk away against his better judgment,

his will, and his desire.

That is why we are so stunned by the adversative construction that escapes Adam's lips at line 247:

But if much converse perhaps

Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield.

For solitude somtimes is best societie,

And short retirement urges sweet returne. (9.247-50)

Can one get too much of the sweet conversation of wedded bliss in Paradise? Adam told Raphael that conversation

with him brought "no satietie" (8.216); he could not get enough. Is conversation with Eve any different? Or still

more incredible, could Eve possibly be sated with Adam's conversation? Given all we've heard that seems unlikely.

Adam argued with God that Paradise can be no Paradise in solitude: "In solitude/ What happiness, who can enjoy

alone,/ Or all enjoying, what contentment find?" (8.364-66). And his Maker agreed with him: "It is not good for the

man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18, PL 8.444-45). Only God can truly find best society in solitude. We must conclude

that Adam prevaricates here, and so does Eve. She is not really sharing what's on her mind.
 18
Just how much of Raphael's private talk with Adam did she overhear when she returned from tending her

flowers? She says that she overheard the archangel warn of "an Enemie … who seeks/ Our ruin," but that warning,

the chief substance of Raphael's divine commission, was delivered to Adam and Eve long before the "shut of

Evening Flours," and she was visibly present at the time, sitting "retir'd in sight" (8.41), not eavesdropping from

inside a "shadie nook" (9.274-79). Raphael's explicit warning about Satan's plan to seduce mankind from obedience

appears at the end of book 6, lines 900-912. There is no reason to believe that Eve is not present then, even though

the entire discourse, which begins in book 5, is addressed to Adam, "prime of men" (5.563) and closes by

admonishing Adam to "warn thy weaker" (6.909). The narrator assures us only fifty or so lines later that both Adam

and "his consorted Eve/ The storie heard attentive" (7.50-51); if she heard the whole story of hate and war in

heaven, why should we not assume she heard the capstone warning, too?

More than twenty years ago, Jean Hagen called attention to this apparent contradiction. Eve says she heard

Raphael's warning about Satan as he parted from Adam, but that is not the substance of Raphael's parting words and

she heard such a warning much earlier in the day before she left Adam alone with Raphael. Hagen very perceptively

speculates that Milton was of two minds about Eve's sufficiency, so much so that he suffered a lapse of memory and

confused the end of book 6 with the end of book 8. "He can therefore allow Eve on the morning of the Fall to make

an assertion about how she learned of Satan's enmity which contradicts what the epic narrator has said but which

harmonizes with the dominant role assigned to Adam during Raphael's visit and with the subordinate role given to

Eve."17 I think Gagen mistakes as ambivalence Milton's excruciatingly careful calibration of full and sufficient

humanity with female inferiority everywhere apparent in his presentation of Eve. And I think Milton did not nod or

become confused; rather he presents us with an Eve newly uncertain about how Adam regards her after his private

talk with Raphael, and so uncertain how she should regard herself. This uncertainty, not apparent in Eve since her

first lesson in conversation with Adam recounted by her in book 4, has been produced (or might we say re-

produced, for that uncertainty was precisely what she lost when she yielded on that first day of consciouness, to

Adam's superior inward wisdom) partly by their first separation which lasted some hours, and partly, I think, by

what she has overheard of Raphael's warnings to Adam. I agree with Gagen that Eve heard something from
 19
Raphael's parting remarks to Adam, remarks he probably had intended for Adam's ears alone, that upset her and

made her feel for the first time since she married Adam that Adam might regard her as someone or something

separate from her, rather than as the outward manifestation in female beauty of his very own inward grace and

wisdom.

This line of thinking raises a kind of sidebar question: are we to believe that Adam becomes aware of Eve's

absence as he converses with Raphael about the cosmos and then about his own first waking and then about Eve and

how her beauty makes him feel? If so, at which point does he realize she is not in eyesight or earshot? When

Raphael warns Adam to stop dreaming of other worlds and "Be lowlie wise," do they already know Eve cannot hear

(8.173)? Or when Adam tells Raphael that talking with him is like sitting in heaven and devises a subtle plan to

detain his guest a bit longer (8.207-16)? Or when he confesses to Raphael the "commotion strange" he feels when

he touches Eve's loveliness and that passion tempts him almost to think she is his superior not only in beauty but in

wisdom, virtue, knowledge and nobility (8.530-57)?

The question is unanswerable. But Milton deliberately invites us to ponder it. His narrator told us that

neither man nor angel saw Eve depart, but that doesn't mean they did not notice she was gone at some later point

and resort to a knowingly private conversation, between males. This would mean that Raphael upbraids, even

rebukes Adam out of Eve's hearing, which bespeaks angelic discretion and a proper care for Adam's dignity. It

would also mean that Adam makes Eve a topic of conversation between men and so relegates her for a few brief

lines to the status of an object apart from him and onto whom he trains his own gaze (and invites another’s), a gaze

that produces passion exactly to the extent that it separates her outward beauty from that of which it is the image—

his inward wisdom. Separated from Adam's inward wisdom, Raphael explains with "contracted brow," Eve's beauty

is simply "shows," like an idol (8.575). Not only should Adam not yield to passion's temptation to subject himself to

her outward shows, he can only rightly cherish those shows if he does not forget that in them he sees the outward

expression of his inward "realities." Only thus can he do well by loving her; in passion he cannot.

Are we to imagine that Eve heard Adam's confession that he is tempted to overvalue her? Did she hear

Raphael's rebuke and explanation? It really doesn't matter how we answer this, because as Raphael has explained,
 20
the real danger is not in what Eve hears but in how Adam is tempted to mistake Eve and her beauty as something

separate from himself. The first separation, when Eve simply walked away unnoticed, is only dangerous insofar as

Adam uses it as an occasion to think about, talk about and gaze on Eve's beauty as a thing in itself apart from him.

When Raphael delivers his parting admonition, the one Eve says she overheard, his warning about

temptation is richer by far than the one he delivered in book 6:

Be strong, live happie, and love, but first of all

Him whom to love is to obey, and keep

His great command; take heed lest Passion sway

Thy Judgment to do aught, which else free Will

Would not admit; thine and of all thy Sons

The weal or woe in thee is plac't; beware.

I in thy persevering shall rejoyce,

And all the Blest: stand fast; to stand or fall

Free in thine own Arbitrement it lies.

Perfet within, no outward aid require;

And all temptation to transgress repel. (PL 8.633-44)

It is richer because for Adam it includes the warning about passion and loving Eve incorrectly as an outward object

rather than as an "individual solace dear" (4.486). If we imagine Eve heard some of that warning, or even if we

simply imagine that she senses the separateness from Adam engendered by his conversation with Raphael, we can

begin to see a motivation for her disastrously mistaken "first thoughts," for Adam's disturbing rejoinder, and for

Eve's hurt feelings and Adam's horribly defensively aggressive "Go … Go" (9.373-74).

Before we get to those tragic imperatives, however, the conversation slowly goes awry as neither Eve nor

Adam really says what's on her or his mind. The conversation they should be having is about how Adam regards

Eve. That is what is really on her mind. But how can she bring this up without confessing her eavesdropping? More
 21
important, how can she bring this up in a way that preserves Adam’s dignity? Can he confess his errors, mistakes

about his wife and his passion, to Eve as readily as he did to Raphael? Perhaps Eve chooses the only method that

allows Adam to save face—indirection. Are the looks and smiles to which she has looked forward truly dangers to

him, she asks. This is Adam’s cue to explain to Eve what the angel has taught him, to raise the issue himself. Adam

misses this cue and in doing so, he preserves rather than heals the small cracks of misperceived self and other that

now divide them. So Adam’s bizarre suggestion that solitude may sometimes be the best society does not come

“from nowhere,” as Fish suggests, but from his own reluctance to share with Eve all of his private conversation with

Raphael. He withholds part of the self he shared with Raphael. Milton makes Adam echo Cicero’s observation that

Africanus was never so little alone as when by himself, a comment rooted in nostalgia for his dead friend. The echo

carries odors of death and nostalgia entirely inappropriate to the first friendship Milton depicts.

In response, Eve ascribes to Adam the "fear that my firm Faith and Love/ Can by [Satan's] fraud be shak'n or

seduc't" and she feels insulted by such fears: "Thoughts, which how found they harbour in thy brest/ Adam,

misthought of her to thee so dear?" (9.286-89). Her firm faith in and love for whom? For Adam no doubt. "Hee for

God only, shee for God in him" we recall from book four (299). But if God's commission to Raphael to warn Adam

about temptation to disobedience makes any sense at all (and there's some reason to think it may not), it cannot be

unthinkable that Adam's faith in and love for God may be shaken or seduced. If that is so, then why should Eve be

upset to learn that her faith in and love for Adam may similarly be shaken by the enemy's wiles? She shouldn't be

and she probably isn't. What upsets her is that she heard Raphael warn Adam about his passion for her. Her beauty

might become the occasion for Adam's being shaken and seduced. This would make more sense, but that is not what

she says.

Adam also has trouble saying what must be on his mind. Having listened carefully to Raphael's warnings

about overvaluing female beauty and how submitting to passion can diminish his self-esteem with tragic results,

Adam certainly knows he is the stronger. Raphael enjoined him, in Eve's presence, to "warne/ Thy weaker" (6.908-

909). Why then does he now tell Eve that he is just trying to save her from the "dishonour foul" that would be done

her by a foe who "suppos'd" her "Not incorruptible . . . not proof/ Against temptation" (9.297-99)? Neither of them
 22
is incorruptible; neither is temptation proof. That is why, as far as Adam knows, Raphael was sent to warn them.

Raphael delivers his warning knowing something Adam does not know—that he and Eve will fall to temptation. All

of the heavenly host heard the Father announce his plan of salvation for fallen mankind in book 3. When the Father

commissions Raphael, he does so not simply to warn Adam lest he fall, but so that when he does fall he will have no

excuse:

tell him withal

His danger, and from whom, what enemie

Late falln himself from Heav'n, is plotting now [ 240 ]

The fall of others from like state of bliss;

By violence, no, for that shall be withstood,

But by deceit and lies; this let him know,

Lest wilfully transgressing he pretend

Surprisal, unadmonisht, unforewarnd. (PL 5.238-45)

If Adam is mutable, Eve is even more so. Why does he not just say so?

He begins to say so in the lines that follow:

Nor thou his malice and false guile contemn;

Suttle he needs must be, who could seduce

Angels nor think superfluous others aid. (306-308)

but then he quickly changes tack again by suggesting, with utmost gallantry, that it is he who receives aid from her:

I from the influence of thy looks receave

Access in every Vertue, in thy sight

More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were

Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on,

Shame to be overcome or over-reacht

Would utmost vigor raise, and rais'd unite.

 23
Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel

When I am present, and thy trial choose

With me, best witness of thy Vertue tri'd. (309-17)

The words Milton puts in Adam's mouth echo those of Phaedrus in Plato's Symposium. He recommended that

armies and cities be populated with lovers and their beloveds always side-by-side because,

such men as these, when fighting side by side, one might almost consider able to make even a little

band victorious over all the world. For a man in love would surely choose to have all the rest of the

host rather than his favorite see him forsaking his station or flinging away his arms; sooner than this,

he would prefer to die many deaths: while, as for leaving his favorite in the lurch, or not succoring

him in his peril, no man is such a craven that Love's own influence cannot inspire him with a valor

that makes him equal to the bravest born. (Symposium 179a)18

Phaedrus, of course, is talking about men whose lovers are men, but as I have argued at length elsewhere, Milton re-

imagined marriage along the lines of classical doctrines of homoerotic love and friendship, especially those he

learned from Plato. Adam treats Eve as a friend, a fit help in pleasure and in possible danger. Perhaps the most

important element of classical friendship doctrine is equality, however, and Eve keeps hammering away at the one

element Adam would prefer not to address openly—their inequality. Aristotle taught that the best of friends must be

equals, but friendship could have an equalizing effect on unequal partners.19

As many have pointed out before, Eve raises an argument about untried virtue very similar to that Milton

articulated in Areopagitica.20 She feels that less has been attributed to her faith and virtue and she challenges Adam

either to admit that is true or to allow her to prove herself equal to him in faith and virtue.

And what is Faith, Love, Vertue unassaid

Alone, without exterior help sustaind?

Let us not then suspect our happie State

Left so imperfet by the Maker wise,

 24
As not secure to single or combin'd.

Fraile is our happiness, if this be so,

And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd. (9.335-41)

Eve does indeed echo the argument from Areopagitica, but it is an argument ill applied in this case. It is beside the

point.

Before Eve was born of God and man, Adam alleged that Paradise would be no Paradise if he lived there

alone: "In solitude/ What happiness, who can enjoy alone/ Or all enjoying what contentment find?" (8.364-66).

Eve's point, that Eden is "no Eden" if they are not individually "secure" and sufficient to stand up to the enemy runs

directly contrary to Adam's claim that he cannot take pleasure "though in pleasure" itself without the company of a

fit partner (8.402). If Paradise is no Paradise in solitude, then separation itself, willful separation, spells the end of

Paradise even before the enemy tempts Eve to disobedience. Separation means Paradise is at least temporarily gone,

unavailable in its truest sense, for Milton’s Paradise is not simply a garden (or a relationship with a garden as in

Marvell’s “The Garden”), but a conversation in the garden. This is why the narrator laments the separation almost

as much as he will the advent of disobedience: "O much deceav'd, much failing, hapless Eve,/ Of thy presum'd

return! event perverse!/ Thou never from that houre in Paradise/ Foundst either sweet repast, or sound repose"

(9.404-407).

Milton wants us to believe that Adam would have done better to remind Eve that she is indeed the weaker

vessel and that he is not complete without her, that Eden is no Eden when she is gone.21 (And for some time at least,

their marriage will be “no marriage” as long as she is an unfit partner.22) But he does not. Eve's argument for her

independent sufficiency touches on his own vulnerable sense of being incomplete without her, and so he responds,

“fervently” now rather than calmly (9.342), with a brief manifesto on his own perfection, ignoring for the moment

what in his conversation with his Maker he called his "single imperfection"—solitude (8.423).

O Woman, best are all things as the will

Of God ordain'd them, his creating hand

Nothing imperfet or deficient left

 25
Of all that he Created, much less Man,

Or aught that might his happie State secure,

Secure from outward force. (9.343-48)

Before Eve was born Adam's argument was that solitude made pleasure impossible; now his argument should be

that without the pleasure of fit company, it doesn't matter whether or not each is individually sufficient to withstand

temptation. Had he said to Eve that Paradise is no Paradise without her to talk to, he would might have come closer

to settling the argument. On a slightly more misogynistic note, Milton may wish us to wonder why Adam doesn’t

“intermix’ here some “Grateful digressions” or “solve” this “high dispute” with conjugal caresses” (8.54-56). Eve

had been looking forward to this sort of conversation with Adam. Something besides words “from his Lip” might

have been pretty effective at a moment like this, but Adam is at this point moved by a new passion—anger.

Adam’s anger is evident as much in what he fails to say as in what he says. Missing here are the lovely

epithets with which he was wont to address his “Sole partner” (4.411). Instead he starts his speech with “O

Woman,” and what follows makes their partnership, their erstwhile paradisal conversation, sound like some sort of

buddy system, appropriate for wartime patrol, not for wedded bliss in Paradise. Adam recalls Eve’s least paradisal

moment so far—her nightmare—when he explains that even the most “erect” reason can be surprised by “some

faire appeering good” that is not good at all, and so “dictate false, and misinforme the Will” to disobey God’s

injunction (9.353-55). “Some specious object” can deceive either of them, so it is best, he argues, that they keep

“strictest watch” on each other. What dictates such a fearful and anxious version of the purposes for their conjugal

conversation—“tender love” or anger and resentment (357)?

Finally, he concludes that they should mind each other—“I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me” (358).

This line invites so many different senses because it registers Adam’s lack of calm. Should he mind her the way a

sitter minds a child? The opposite sense, that he should obey her, sails too close to unseemly submission; she’s

supposed to yield to his wisdom. Adam’s efforts at rhetorical equanimity betray his frustration and rising anger until

he almost resorts to a kind of domestic tyranny: “Wouldst thou approve thy constancie, approve/ First thy
 26
obedience” (367-68). Then, with more than a slight note of meanness, he throws fresh doubt on the very point of

“high dispute” Eve needs him to settle—her individual power of “constancie”: th' other who can know,/ Not seeing

thee attempted, who attest?” (368-69) and then he issues that notorious passive aggressive challenge: "Go; for thy

stay, not free, absents thee more;/ Go in thy native innocence, relie/ On what thou hast of vertue" (372-74). Once

before, when Eve walked away unnoticed, her grace and beauty "shot Darts of desire/ Into all Eyes to wish her still

in sight" (8.26-63). Now Adam watches her as she walks away and desires her to stay, but fails to say so: "Her long

with ardent look his Eye pursu'd/ Delighted, but desiring more her stay" (9.397-98).

The separation conversation in book 9 almost invites us to see Eve in the role of Aeneas, proving her

independent worth by striking out on her own. She leaves Adam on his own, which for him means the end of

pleasure and the end of Paradise for solitude intermits both pleasure and Paradise. She sets out to found her own

destiny, her own empire: the empire of solitude and woe. And as in Virgil's epic, the separation that brings on death

and woe is effected without conversation, for this separation conversation in book 9 is the antithesis of married

conversation. It is a non-conversation or anti-conversation. In Genesis, in fact, it never happened at all.

1
2
All quotations from Milton’s poetry come from Luxon, Thomas H., ed. The Milton Reading Room,

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton, November 16, 2009.

3
Delirous Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 152-53.
 27
4
Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1994), 89; Smith, Is Milton Better than Shakespeare Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 64-

69; Picciotto, “The Public person and the Play of Fact,” an unpublished paper delivered at the November 2008

meeting of the Northeast Milton Seminar in Princeton NJ, page 8

5
Of Education in Don M. Wolfe, general ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1953-1974) 2.366-67. All quotations from Milton’s prose come from this edition as CPW.
6
John Milton and the Transformations of Ancient Epic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble books, 1986) 133. See also

his remarks on page 9 about “the moral shortcomings of classical epic.”

7
Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 171-72. I say even Diane

McColley, because as I note below McColley's reading of the separation scene is strongly committed to seeing

nothing whatever amiss in Eve's argument for separation from Adam. These acknowledgments about "hurt feelings"

and issues of self-esteem tell against her general interpretation.

8
This is the subject of my book, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Pittsburgh: Duquesne

University Press, 2005).

9
See chapter 2 of Single Imperfection.
10
For a fine discussion of males self esteem and the “beauty contest” in Paradise Lost, see John Guillory, "Milton,

Narcissism, Gender: On the Genealogy of Male Self-Esteem." Critical Essays on John Milton. Edited by

Christopher Kendrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995) 165-193. But see also Jonathan Goldberg’s critique of

Guillory’s analysis (and mine for that matter) in chapter 5 (“Milton’s Angels”) of The Seeds of Things: Theorizing

Sexuality and materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 179-209.
11
Colasterion in CPW 2.740. And see the answerer’s sneering complaint, “if you would once tell what you mean

by conversation…” in An Answer to a Book, Intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (London, 1644) from

Early English Books Online (EEBO)

 28

http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:47977:9,

November 21, 2009.

12
See Barbara Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms.
13
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 535-38.
14
See my discussion of this in Single Imperfection 152-54.
15
Most recently William Poole also calls attention to Eve's eavesdropping, but he does it parenthetically and does

not pursue the problems it presents. See Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2005), 176.
16
William Poole, myself, mention some others.
17
Jean Gagen, "Did Milton Nod?" Milton Quarterly 20 (1986), 21. Mention John Leonard's note and David

Kastan's note.
18
Plato, Symposium from The Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-

bin/ptext?lookup=Plat.+Sym.+179a) 27 February, 2007.

19
See Single Imperfection and Nicomachean Ethics.
20
McColley, 172-73.
21
Joan Bennett suggests as much when she reads Adam's "Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more" (9.372) as a

"tactical rather than moral" failure—a failure to keep the conversation going until Eve perfectly understands why

they should not separate, and chooses to remain beside him.21 And when Adam, faced shortly after with a fallen

Eve, opts almost immediately for death rather than life without her, Bennett sees another missed opportunity for

patience, suggesting that divorce was not Adam's only other option (as I have argued elsewhere); he could have

chosen to remain Eve's husband in hopes of her regeneration. Bennett quotes from Tetrachordon to support this

idea:

if neither the infirmity of the Christian, nor the strength of the unbeleever, be fear'd, but hopes

appearing that he [or she?] may be won, he [Paul] judges it no breaking of that law, though the
 29

beleever be permitted to forbeare divorce, and can abide, without the peril of seducement, to offer the

charity of a salvation to wife or husband, which is the fulfilling, not the transgressing of that law; and

well worth the undertaking with much hazard and patience. (CPW 2.689)21

Milton cannot, of course, rewrite the story so that Adam divorces the fallen Eve, but the poem prompts us to

imagine such an alternative.21 Bennett's point is that Milton is even more interested in prompting us to imagine a

sinless Adam who remains wedded to a fallen Eve as Christ is to his church, offering himself not just as a patient

longsuffering spouse but as a perfect, as yet un-fallen, substitute for her—that is, one who offers to die for her, a

kind of martyr. Such action would better merit Eve's acclamation: "O glorious trial of exceeding Love,/ Illustrious

evidence, example high!" (PL 9.961-62).21

22
See Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: “such a mariage can be no mariage whereto the most honest end is

wanting” in CPW 2.247.

[I must also work in references to Grossman, Morrissey, Danielson and some others who have written about the

separation conversation.]