From an aesthetic, or mannerism perspective, gentlemen had indeed almost entirely perished from the Isles. But the idea that no one should be seen confronting anyone, and a stiff upper lip must be kept at all times had passed onto generations after generations well and intact. But does a combination of that and an increasingly restrictive legal system means nothing can ever be done to rescue Great Britain from its managed decline?
Not really. But the struggle needs to start small, tiny first steps to ease everyone out of the mindset of being a ‘gentleman’.
Unfortunately, if you started pushing over idle motorcycles on your local taxi ranks and smashing windows on your local ‘souvenir shop’, you won’t last long until your own people (yes, your own people) will start reporting you to the KGB (Komitet-Gosudarstvennoy-Bezopasnosti Great Britain), and the government WILL be on your opposition’s side.
What you need to do what some may call a ‘petty nuisance’, completely within the boundaries of law. Or rather, practicing your rights to its maximum, and making the ENEMY’s life harder – cross a zebra crossing just as a Deliveroo rider or a matte-black tinted-window Range Rover arrives so they will have to stop, if they don’t, make them, it is YOUR right! There are much more ways to do this, the sky really is the limit.
Be an active petty nuisance to your enemy, this is your last resistance to those who are invading your life. It may sound humble, perhaps futile, but it keeps the spirit of resistance awake, reminds you that this is still an active struggle, it kills the gentlemanly mindset to give in, to compromise, it keeps a little bit of that fire alive. You will find yourself fighting back more and more as you become more and more comfortable with it. And eventually, perhaps hoping, you will find yourself winning, in this petit crusade, fought with petty nuisance.
This is an excerpt from “Nuclear”.
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How to Deal with an Ideological Villain
A pet peeve of mine is when an antagonist in a book, show, or movie is driven by an ideology that, when he or she is inevitably defeated, nonetheless remains without being dismantled or rendered inept in some way. While, today, it is more often the protagonist driven by his or her writer’s self-inserted worldview, antagonists have, for over a century, often had ideological motivations–saving the climate, achieving some form of racial or sexual (but never ideological) equity, promoting radical resource conservation, whatever. Of course, we keep our hands clean by having the villain nominally lose, but that still leaves the ideology to be dealt with.
If left unanswered, the antagonist’s scheme, though foiled in its dastardly implementation, can too easily become a case of a merely overzealous attempt to produce what some believe to be a nonetheless good, noble goal with whatever hue of progressivism initially drove him or her. The good and the bad becomes, thus, not a matter of principle or goal but of method–the villain or villainess was such because he or she was too radical for those around him or her, etc. Hence, you get people considering whether the Marvel Universe’s Thanos was right in trying to reduce planetary populations by half, whether it wouldn’t be just for Godzilla: King of the Monsters’s Dr. Emma Russel to accelerate some a titanic climate emergency to fully dispense with humanity, or whether X-Men’s Magneto’s openly violent revolution for minority-mutant acceptance wouldn’t be justified–if not just a little satisfying.
Of course, the author who led the way with dealing with explicitly ideological villains was Dostoevsky, who reached his zenith of popularity, not to mention innovation, by dismantling Turgenev’s and Chernyshevsky’s ideological heroes. He did this often through mockery but predominantly through exposing to light of their ideologies through his antagonists who share them. Let us attend: the two–exposure and mockery–can and arguably should go hand-in-hand.
Dostoevsky made it his M.O. to resolve his characters’ conflicts by showing why their motivations are as bad as (or worse than) the attempted implementation. However, there was another writer, up to whom Dostoevsky looked, who was already doing this in England before Dostoevsky hit the Russian literary scene. I am, of course, talking about Charles Dickens.
No reader of Dickens can miss his criticism of the perspectives and politics of his day, be it open scorn, mocking satire, or earnest plea. While not all of his villains recant their ideas, one of his most complete cases of repentance is also one of his most popular tales, especially come Yuletide. This is none other than A Christmas Carol.
Now, readers will not need me to review the plot of Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name has become synonymous with Christmas in the English-speaking world. However, I nonetheless want to briefly examine points in Scrooge’s arc to see how it is not only his avarice but also the then popular ideology that justified it that is defeated in the end. Dickens pretty handily sets up the contemporary pop philosophy that gilds Scrooge’s greed. Rejecting personal charity for the impersonal, tax-funded state institutions of ‘“prisons…Union workhouses…the Treadmill and the Poor Law,”’ he identifies himself in the first scene as a Social Darwinist and Malthusian Utilitarian. ‘“Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,”’ as one of the scene’s collectors of charity puts it? Bah–humbug! ‘“I help to support the establishments I have mentioned,”” he says, ‘“they cost enough; and those that are badly off must go there…If they would rather die…they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”’ In Scrooge, Dickens concretises the worst versions of the ideologies gaining popularity as an increasingly rationalistic society dispensed with Christian superstitions of God’s image in each individual, and with them the Christian ethics behind giving of one’s own to the poor.
Of course, Dickens includes us in the dramatic irony that Scrooge’s integrity is neither admirable nor monstrous (yet), but pitiable and foolish. The former is articulated when, drawn through key moments of his past by the Ghost of Christmases thereof–his lonely Christmases as a child, his little sister who would leave behind his supposedly foolish nephew, his erstwhile love for the Christmas season at Old Fezziwig’s regardless of its cost in ‘mortal money’–Scrooge is reminded of how spectacularly he fumbled the bag with his fiancée Belle by grasping a different bag too tightly. The enlightened self-righteousness of Scrooge’s post-Christian ethic is neither as internally consistent nor as impressive as its holder might try to maintain: juxtaposing Scrooge’s excited apology for Fezziwig’s party in spite of himself with an unwillingness to look on the greed that would lead to his present loneliness, Dickens makes clear that Scrooge’s ideological righteousness covers a deeply buried sense of failure, regret, and betrayal of the best aspects of his past self. The scene shakes Scrooge’s supposedly staid principles, and his explicit and implicit admissions that gold is not the be-all, end-all valuer of life serve to begin his reformation.
Having shown why Scrooge is to be pitied for his Malthusian views (which he may not even fully hold), Dickens progresses to show Scrooge that he has also been unnecessarily foolish to hold them. Satisfying the first scene’s foreshadowing, this foolishness is shown when the Ghost of Christmas Present gives us more of his nephew, Fred.
Hard on the heels of shaming Scrooge with the mistreated Bob Cratchit’s nonetheless toasting him, the second Ghost presents Fred’s dinner party, sans uncle. Whereas Cratchit politely rebuffed his wife’s insults to Scrooge, Fred does the same to his wife’s with jollity. ‘“His wealth is of no use to him. He doesn’t do any good with it.”’ When his wife says, ‘“I have no patience with him,”’ Fred returns:
‘“Oh, I have!…I am sorry for him: I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself, always…[The] consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that…he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts, either in his moldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him.”’
The girls mock the idea of Scrooge’s ever taking Fred up on that chance. However, unbeknownst to them, their mock unknowingly digs the knife of change further into the invisible uncle–not by disclaiming the immorality of his avarice (which might harden him), but by showing how foolish he is to maintain his proud isolation in it.
And the fact is that Scrooge would much rather be with them. In spite of himself, he tries his invisible darnedest to play along with the group’s games, which leads him, unsuspectingly, into being the butt of the night’s climactic joke. Having already shown Scrooge the ineffectuality of his gold and spite, Dickens meets both not with other characters’ argument but with mockery. Little wonder that the later Dostoevsky, who would mock his characters while showing the disastrous real-world consequences of their ideas, counted Dickens as one of his primary influences.
And yet, Dickens does not risk leaving things there, for one man’s pitiable past and foolish present might not undermine an entire ideology, even to the man himself. Before he leaves, the second Ghost reveals to Scrooge the true nature of his ideas–in the forms of the emaciated siblings, Ignorance and Want, hidden beneath his heretofore abundant cloak. ‘“Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.”’ Pushed to choose between the utilitarian phrases of his ideology and his own human sympathy, Scrooge ultimately cannot utter the former.
Readers don’t need me to review Scrooge’s interview with the third Ghost. Suffice it to say, his initial viewpoint, if followed through, will land him little posthumous respect among the living, even those who nominally venerate the old skinflint. Furthermore, to add insult to injury, with none to care for his affairs, Scrooge’s possessions will land in the hands of petty thieves–who, as a last insult to his way of life, parody him in their penny pinching over his personal effects. In death, he is treated according to the utilitarian ideology he espoused in life.
Now, several moments in A Christmas Carol are, without a doubt, moralistic and even a bit preachy in dealing with Scrooge’s ideology (example, the two waifs, above), and can, thus, arguably be skipped in retellings or depictions without the story’s–or Scrooge’s humbling’s–losing much weight. As I have previously written on the story, the falling away of such excesses, bound as they are to ideas and issues contemporary to its writing, is the beginning of a work’s usefulness as art. That so much of A Christmas Carol remains despite its initial polemic speaks to Dickens’s ability to make a point without its feeling like he is doing so.
And yet, his depiction of Social Darwinism remains relevant–not the least because Scrooge’s hardnosed display foreshadows those in our own day who promote state redistribution schemes while foregoing personal charity, yet somehow still thinking themselves moral and on the side of the poor. Furthermore, current progressive ideologies often take on the same self-satisfied tone, even glee, as Scrooge at the supposedly justified handicap or destruction (always their fault) of the designated outgroup–white men, “the rich,” landlords, heteronormative family units, groups indigenous to European lands, etc. Their hijacking every medium they can for the sake not of creating good art but of spreading “The Message” has left a dearth of art and stories that seek not only to include the majority of audiences but also to simply be good for their own sake. The question among conservative creators (which, as I argue in the above linked article, not to mention my novel, includes many more than those who consider or label themselves conservative) of how to create the best art can and should point us to authors like Dickens and Dostoevsky.
While politics was not the point for such authors, they did not shy away from dealing with insidious ideas of their day. The difference between them and authors who see art as inherently political was and should be that, in treating art as a function of greater things than politics–not to mention weighing it against human experience and tradition–they exposed inhuman ideas fully in the lives of their characters. Such a thing necessarily leads, as can be seen in A Christmas Carol, towards at least some characters’ repenting of their ideology towards a more wholistically human ethic that balances personal rights and interests with duties and responsibilities for others–one I would argue is best found in the Christian view of man and its subsequent moral tradition, articulated implicitly in Dickens and explicitly in Dostoevsky.
Like many pre-20th-century books, A Christmas Carol is refreshing, if nothing else because its lesson is for its protagonist (who is also its antagonist), not its readers, who are included in the joke. However, even thus reducing it to a “lesson” is to render it as inhumanly provincial as is the pre-repentance Scrooge. We should look to older literature not just to nostalgically escape the present (though that’s often a necessary salve), nor to learn how to “retvrn” to a time before all the other advancements our culture has made (on the backs of the previous centuries’ literature and ethics, one should add). We should do so because older books have survived the changing of times.
Said survival is not, as Marxist progressives claim, because their popularity has been artificially and oppressively maintained in various social traditions and structures (though one man’s supposedly oppressive structure might be many other men’s most efficient means of justly and safely ordering society). Rather, it is because their authors concretised elements of human life that are and will remain immutably true. That, of course, can have implicit ideological or political (etc.) ramifications, but such accidental effects are not their core substance. Watching a rendition of A Christmas Carol to get into the Christmas spirit might have the effects of motivating us to give to the less fortunate or to look, Cratchit-like, with forgiveness on even the most oppressive of our fellow men (or on ourselves, as Scrooge, himself, learns to do). However, to see this kind of thing as inherently political or ideological is, itself, to maintain an ideology about the relationship between art, actual people, and each other that would reduce all three. Thankfully, should we want to dismantle such a thing, we know where to look.
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The Obsession with News
In 1980, Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld co-founded the Cable News Network (CNN). Despite derision over the idea of a 24 hour rolling news channel, CNN became a massive hit and would become the forefather to the news system today. In the 43 years since CNN first aired, news channels have changed from having bulletins every few hours to being on air 24/7. Our parents would have to wait for the top of the hour for news, unless breaking news broke into programming, whilst we can just turn it on with a press of a button.
Whilst many may marvel at the idea of 24 hour news, it is part of why news today has its problems. As a result of constant media absorption, competition from social media and the internet, as well as a fast-paced world, society itself has become obsessed with the news. Every tiny little story becomes splashed across screens, both large and small, in a desperate attempt to capture the moment before it vanishes.
Everything is Breaking News
If, like me, you have the BBC news app alert on your phone, then this will be a similar tale. The alert goes off. You check it. Whilst it’s officially classed as ‘Breaking News,’ it’s not really that important. Some things are of course important. Look at the death of Her Majesty The Queen last year. That was a news story that knocked everything else off the air. Considering that she had been our monarch since 1952, it’s fair to say that this was incredibly important breaking news.
Generally, the app applies the term ‘Breaking News’ rather liberally. Holly Willoughby leaving This Morning after fourteen years is not worth your phone going off. Beyoncé removing ‘offensive lyrics’ from an old song isn’t worth it either.
That also applies to news channels. Sky News and BBC will have that ticket going across the bottom of the screen quite happily for just about any reason. Rare is the day where the bottom of Sky News is not a flash of yellow and black. Even a slow news day will have breaking news just to keep things a bit fresh.
It’s understandable really. In this day and age, news travels fast. It comes and goes in the blink of the eyes. News companies want to have their hold on the story before the next one comes. When Twitter/X or Facebook gets the news first, well, that’s one less story that they’ve managed to break to viewers. The big media organisations may have the means to research the stories and get the scoops, but they don’t ever get it out first. One is more likely to find out a story through social media than they are the 24 hour news or their app.
Considering the point of the 24 hour news cycle is to be fresh, that’s not really a good thing.
Every Little Story, Made Bigger
On the 18th April 1930, BBC news would announce that “there is no news.”
Can you imagine that today? Another issue with the 24 hour cycle and news today is the fact that there’s a desperation to find something to report on. When channels and apps are never off, they can’t have a rest. Something must be going on. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it must be something.
Perhaps it’s a take on a news story through the issue of race, gender or sexuality. Perhaps it’s a random study from Australia. Whatever it is, it’s got a place in the news because it’s something.
Take for example the Daily Climate Show on Sky News. What was originally a daily, thirty minute slot on prime time was axed to a weekend event. It’s not hard to see why this was. In its desperation to make more news out of something, Sky took a risk by devoting half an hour everyday to the exact same topic. Considering how climate change and its presentation is a divisive subject, it was hardly a risk worth taking. Changing it to every weekend was still a poorly thought out move.
Repetition
You might turn the news on when you get up at seven in the morning. You might turn the news on at ten before you go to bed. What might link those two viewings is that they are exactly the same.
When the media can’t slot a new story in, they’ll just repeat it. If it’s an unfolding story, then of course you’ll see it or read about it again later because there are news things to be said. The problem occurs when it’s the same story over and over again.
Nobody wants to hear the same story they did fifteen hours ago without new information. It’s tiresome.
The Fear Factor
Then there’s the fear in which the media thrives.
From the moment that Boris Johnson told us that we now had to stay in our homes because of COVID, the media was all over the pandemic- perhaps even before then. With nothing else happening because everyone was locked down, all the media could do was run constant stories about the ever climbing death toll. At first, well, it was what we expected. Then it started to get a bit repetitive.
These stories tend to get a much frostier reception if reported today. Commentators scold the media for trying to scare us or create fear.
They could, however, get away with it during those early months. With nothing else to do, we had more time for the news. Their stories were constantly about the deaths and after effects of COVID. We were already unable to leave our homes and live our daily lives, with constant mask wearing when we went out, so did we need to be intimidated even more?
It’s not just COVID. Look at the climate protestors, especially the young ones, when interviewed. Some of them cry in fear for their future, weeping about the thought of a planet that could be gone when they have reached adulthood. Considering the constant doomsday coverage of climate change in the news, it’s easy to see where this fear comes from. Kids’ news shows like Sky’s awful FYI focus on the topic regularly. It’s constantly on mainstream news.
Children are more in tune with the world today. With all the darkness in the news and on social media, some will blame it for the declining mental health we are seeing in young people. Indeed, where is the hope? Well, people don’t watch the news to hear about new innovations or cute animals being born in zoos. Fear is more gripping than hope, and a bigger seller too, but it’s not good for morale.
It’s vitally important that we know what’s going on in the world, but too much news is bad for the soul. In a world where it’s all too accessible and the media makes money on constant news, we can’t rely on it for real information. We’re either fed fear or repetitiveness. The obsession with news is, ironically, making us less knowledgeable. Resist the urge to keep up behind what is needed. It’s better for you.
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Eve: The Prototype of the Private Citizen
Written in the 1660s, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the type of book I imagine one could spend a lifetime mining for meaning and still be left with something to learn. Its being conceived as an English Epic that uses the poetic forms and conventions of Homeric and Ovidic antiquity to present a Christian subject, it yields as much to the student of literature as it does to students of history and politics, articulating in its retelling of the Fall many of the fundamental questions at work in the post-Civil-War body politic of the preceding decade (among many other things). Comparable with Dante’s Inferno in form, subject, and depth, Paradise Lost offers—and requires—much to and from readers, and it is one of the deepest and most complex works in the English canon. I thank God Milton did not live a half century earlier or write plays, else I might have to choose between him and Shakespeare—because I’d hesitate to simply pick Shakespeare.
One similarity between Milton and Shakespeare that has import to today’s broader discussion involves the question of whether they present their female characters fairly, believably, and admirably, or merely misogynistically. Being a Puritan Protestant from the 1600s writing an Epic verse version of Genesis 1-3, Milton must have relegated Eve to a place of silent submission, no? This was one of the questions I had when I first approached him in graduate school, and, as I had previously found when approaching Shakespeare and his heroines with the same query, I found that Milton understood deeply the gender politics of Adam and Eve, and he had a greater respect for his heroine than many current students might imagine.
I use “gender politics” intentionally, for it is through the different characterizations of Adam and Eve that Milton works out the developing conception of the citizen in an England that had recently executed its own king. As I’ve written in my discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays, justified or not, regicide has comprehensive effects. Thus, the beheading of Charles I on 30 January 1649 had implications for all 17th-century English citizens, many of which were subsequently written about by many like Margaret Cavendish and John Locke. At issue was the question of the individual’s relation to the monarch; does the citizen’s political identity inhere in the king or queen (Cavendish’s perspective), or does he or she exist as a separate entity (Locke’s)? Are they merely “subjects” in the sense of “the king’s subjects,” or are they “subjects” in the sense of being an active agent with an individual perspective that matters? Is it Divine Right, conferred on and descended from Adam, that makes a monarch, or is it the consent of the governed, of which Eve was arguably the first among mankind?
Before approaching such topics in Paradise Lost, Milton establishes the narrative framework of creation. After an initial prologue that does an homage to the classical invoking of the Muses even as it undercuts the pagan tradition and places it in an encompassing Christian theology (there are many such nuances and tensions throughout the work), Milton’s speaker introduces Satan, nee Lucifer, having just fallen with his third of heaven after rebelling against the lately announced Son. Thinking, as he does, that the Son is a contingent being like himself (rather than a non-contingent being coequal with the Father, as the Son is shown to be in Book III), Satan has failed to submit to a rulership he does not believe legitimate. He, thus, establishes one of the major themes of Paradise Lost: the tension between the individual’s will and God’s. Each character’s conflict inheres in whether or not they will choose to remain where God has placed them—which inerringly involves submitting to an authority that, from their limited perspective, they do not believe deserves their submission—or whether they will reject it and prefer their own apparently more rational interests. Before every major character—Satan, Adam, and Eve—is a choice between believing the superior good of God’s ordered plan and pursuing the seemingly superior option of their individual desires.
Before discussing Eve, it is worth looking at her unheavenly counterpart, Sin. In a prefiguration of the way Eve was formed out of Adam before the book’s events, Sin describes to Satan how she was formed Athena-style out of his head when he chose to rebel against God and the Son, simultaneously being impregnated by him and producing their son, Death. As such she and Satan stand as a parody not only of the parent-progeny-partner relationship of Adam-Eve but also of God and the Son. Describing her illicit role in Lucifer’s rebellion, Sin says that almost immediately after birth,
I pleased and with attractive graces won
The most averse (thee chiefly) who full oft
Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamoured and such joy thou took’st
With me in secret that my womb conceived
A growing burden.
—Paradise Lost II.761-767In here and other places, Sin shows that her whole identity is wrapped up in Satan, her father-mate. In fact, there is rarely any instance where she refers to herself without also referring to him for context or as a counterpoint. Lacking her own, private selfhood from which she is able to volitionally choose the source of her identity and meaning, Sin lives in a state of perpetual torment, constantly being impregnated and devoured by the serpents and hellhounds that grow out of her womb.
Sin’s existence provides a Dantean concretization of Satan’s rebellion, which is elsewhere presented as necessarily one of narcissistic solipsism—a greatness derived from ignoring knowledge that might contradict his supposed greatness. A victim of her father-mate’s “narcissincest” (a term I coined for her state in grad school), Sin is not only an example of the worst state possible for the later Eve, but also, according to many critics, of women in 17th-century England, both in relation to their fathers and husbands, privately, as well as to the monarch (considered by many the “father of the realm”), publically. Through this reading, we can see Milton investigating, through Sin, not only the theology of Lucifer’s fall, but also of an extreme brand of royalism assumed by many at the time. And yet, it is not merely a simple criticism of royalism, per se: though Milton, himself, wrote other works defending the execution of Charles I and eventually became a part of Cromwell’s government, it is with the vehicle of Lucifer’s rebellion and Sin—whose presumptions are necessarily suspect—that he investigates such things (not the last instance of his work being as complex as the issues it investigates).
After encountering the narcissincest of the Satan-Sin relationship in Book II we are treated to its opposite in the next: the reciprocative respect between the Father and the Son. In what is, unsurprisingly, one of the most theologically-packed passages in Western literature, Book III seeks to articulate the throneroom of God, and it stands as the fruit of Milton’s study of scripture, soteriology, and the mysteries of the Incarnation, offering, perhaps wisely, as many questions as answers for such a scene. Front and center is, of course, the relationship between the Son and Father, Whose thrones are surrounded by the remaining two thirds of the angels awaiting what They will say. The Son and Father proceed to narrate to Each Other the presence of Adam and Eve in Eden and Satan’s approach thereunto; They then discuss what will be Their course—how They will respond to what They, omniscient, already know will happen.
One major issue Milton faced in representing such a discussion is the fact that it is not really a discussion—at least, not dialectically. Because of the triune nature of Their relationship, the Son already knows what the Father is thinking; indeed, how can He do anything but share His Father’s thoughts? And yet, the distance between the justice and foresight of the Father (in no ways lacking in the Son) and the mercy and love of the Son (no less shown in the words of the Father) is managed by the frequent use of the rhetorical question. Seeing Satan leave Hell and the chaos that separates it from the earth, the Father asks:
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our Adversary whom no bounds
Prescribed, no bars…can hold, so bent he seems
On desperate revenge that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head?
—Paradise Lost III.80-86The Father does not ask the question to mediate the Son’s apparent lack of knowledge, since, divine like the Father, the Son can presumably see what He sees. Spoken in part for the sake of those angels (and readers) who do not share Their omniscience, the rhetorical questions between the Father and Son assume knowledge even while they posit different ideas. Contrary to the solipsism and lack of sympathy between Sin and Satan (who at first does not even recognize his daughter-mate), Book III shows the mutual respect and knowledge of the rhetorical questions between the Father and Son—who spend much of the scene describing Each Other and Their motives (which, again, are shared).
The two scenes between father figures and their offspring in Books II and III provide a backdrop for the main father-offspring-partner relationship of Paradise Lost: that of Adam and Eve—with the focus, in my opinion, on Eve. Eve’s origin story is unique in Paradise Lost: while she was made out of Adam and derives much of her joy from him, she was not initially aware of him at her nativity, and she is, thus, the only character who has experienced and can remember (even imagine) existence independent of a source.
Book IV opens on Satan reaching Eden, where he observes Adam and Eve and plans how to best ruin them. Listening to their conversation, he hears them describe their relationship and their respective origins. Similar to the way the Father and Son foreground their thoughts in adulatory terms, Eve addresses Adam as, “thou for whom | And from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh | and without whom am to no end, my guide | And head” (IV.440-443). While those intent on finding sexism in the poem will, no doubt, jump at such lines, Eve’s words are significantly different from Sin’s. Unlike Sin’s assertion of her being a secondary “perfect image” of Satan (wherein she lacks positive subjectivity), Eve establishes her identity as being reciprocative of Adam’s in her being “formed flesh,” though still originating in “thy flesh.” She is not a mere picture of Adam, but a co-equal part of his substance. Also, Eve diverges from Sin’s origin-focused account by relating her need of Adam for her future, being “to no end” without Adam; Eve’s is a chosen reliance of practicality, not an unchosen one of identity.
Almost immediately after describing their relationship, Eve recounts her choice of being with Adam—which necessarily involves remembering his absence at her nativity. Hinting that were they to be separated Adam would be just as lost, if not more, than she (an idea inconceivable between Sin and Satan, and foreshadowing Eve’s justification in Book IX for sharing the fruit with Adam, who finds himself in an Eve-less state), she continues her earlier allusion to being separated from Adam, stating that, though she has been made “for” Adam, he a “Like consort to [himself] canst nowhere find” (IV.447-48). Eve then remembers her awakening to consciousness:
That day I oft remember when from sleep
I first awaked and found myself reposed
Under a shade on flow’rs, much wond’ring where
And what I was, whence thither brought and how.
—Paradise Lost IV.449-452Notably seeing her origin as one not of flesh but of consciousness, she highlights that she was alone. That is, her subjective awareness preexisted her understanding of objective context. She was born, to use a phrase by another writer of Milton’s time, tabula rasa, without either previous knowledge or a mediator to grant her an identity. Indeed, perhaps undercutting her initial praise of Adam, she remembers it “oft”; were this not an image of the pre-Fall marriage, one might imagine the first wife wishing she could take a break from her beau—the subject of many critical interpretations! Furthermore, Milton’s enjambment allows a dual reading of “from sleep,” as if Eve remembers that day as often as she is kept from slumber—very different from Sin’s inability to forget her origin due to the perpetual generation and gnashing of the hellhounds and serpents below her waist. The privacy of Eve’s nativity so differs from Sin’s public birth before all the angels in heaven that Adam—her own father-mate—is not even present; thus, Eve is able to consider herself without reference to any other. Of the interrogative words with which she describes her post-natal thoughts— “where…what…whence”—she does not question “who,” further showing her initial isolation, which is so defined that she initially cannot conceive of another separate entity.
Eve describes how, hearing a stream, she discovered a pool “Pure as th’ expanse of heav’n” (IV.456), which she subsequently approached and, Narcissus-like, looked down into.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the wat’ry gleam appeared
Bending to look on me. I started back,
It started back, but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love.
—Paradise Lost IV.460-465When she discovers the possibility that another person might exist, it is, ironically, her own image in the pool. In Eve, rather than in Sin or Adam, we are given an image of self-awareness, without reference to any preceding structural identity. Notably, she is still the only person described in the experience—as she consistently refers to the “shape” as “it.” Eve’s description of the scene contains the actions of two personalities with only one actor; that is, despite there being correspondence in the bending, starting, and returning, and in the conveyance of pleasure, sympathy, and love, there is only one identity present. Thus, rather than referring to herself as an image of another, as does Sin, it is Eve who is here the original, with the reflection being the image, inseparable from herself though it be. Indeed, Eve’s nativity thematically resembles the interaction between the Father and the Son, who, though sharing the same omniscient divinity, converse from seemingly different perspectives. Like the Father Who instigates interaction with His Son, His “radiant image” (III.63), in her first experience Eve has all the agency.
As the only instance in the poem when Eve has the preeminence of being another’s source (if only a reflection), this scene invests her interactions with Adam with special meaning. Having experienced this private moment of positive identity before following the Voice that leads her to her husband, Eve is unique in having the capacity to agree or disagree with her seemingly new status in relation to Adam, having remembered a time when it was not—a volition unavailable to Sin and impossible (and unnecessary) to the Son.
And yet, this is the crux of Eve’s conflict: will she continue to heed the direction of the Voice that interrupted her Narcissus-like fixation at the pool and submit herself to Adam? The ambivalence of her description of how she would have “fixed | Mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire,” over her image had the Voice not come is nearly as telling as is her confession that, though she first recognized Adam as “fair indeed, and tall!” she thought him “less fair, | Less winning soft, less amiably mild | Than that smooth wat’ry image” (IV.465-480). After turning away from Adam to return to the pool and being subsequently chased and caught by Adam, who explained the nature of their relation—how “To give thee being I lent | Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart, | Substantial life to have thee by my side”—she “yielded, and from that time see | How beauty is excelled by manly grace | And wisdom which alone is truly fair” (IV. 483-491). One can read these lines at face value, hearing no undertones in her words, which are, after all, generally accurate, Biblically speaking. However, despite the nuptial language that follows her recounting of her nativity, it is hard for me not to read a subtle irony in the words, whether verbal or dramatic. That may be the point—that she is not an automaton without a will, but a woman choosing to submit, whatever be her personal opinion of her husband.
Of course, the whole work must be read in reference to the Fall—not merely as the climax which is foreshadowed throughout, but also as a condition necessarily affecting the writing and reading of the work, it being, from Milton’s Puritan Protestant perspective, impossible to correctly interpret pre-Fall events from a post-Fall state due to the noetic effects of sin. Nonetheless, in keeping with the generally Arminian tenor of the book—that every character must have a choice between submission and rebellion for their submission to be valid, and that the grace promised in Book III is “Freely vouchsafed” and not based on election (III.175)—I find it necessary to keep in mind, as Eve seems to, the Adam-less space that accompanied her nativity. Though one need not read all of her interaction with Adam as sarcastic, in most of her speech one can read a subtextual pull back to the pool, where she might look at herself, alone.
In Eve we see the fullest picture of what is, essentially, every key character’s (indeed, from Milton’s view, every human’s) conflict: to choose to submit to an assigned subordinacy or abstinence against the draw of a seemingly more attractive alternative, often concretized in what Northrop Frye calls a “provoking object”—the Son being Satan’s, the Tree Adam’s, and the reflection (and private self it symbolizes, along with an implicit alternative hierarchy with her in prime place) Eve’s. In this way, the very private consciousness that gives Eve agency is that which threatens to destroy it; though Sin lacks the private selfhood possessed by Eve, the perpetual self-consumption of her and Satan’s incestuous family allegorizes the impotent and illusory self-returning that would characterize Eve’s existence if she were to return to the pool. Though she might not think so, anyone who knows the myth that hers parallels knows that, far from limiting her freedom, the Voice that called Eve from her first sight of herself rescued her from certain death (though not for long).
The way Eve’s subjectivity affords her a special volition connects with the biggest questions of Milton’s time. Eve’s possessing a private consciousness from which she can consensually submit to Adam parallels John Locke’s “Second Treatise on Civil Government” of the same century, wherein he articulates how the consent of the governed precedes all claims of authority. Not in Adam but in Eve does Milton show that monarchy—even one as divine, legitimate, and absolute as God’s—relies on the volition of the governed, at least as far as the governed’s subjective perception is concerned. Though she cannot reject God’s authority without consequence, Eve is nonetheless able to agree or disagree with it, and through her Milton presents the reality that outward submission does not eliminate inward subjectivity and personhood (applicable as much to marriages as to monarchs, the two being considered parallel both in the poem and at the time of its writing); indeed, the inalienable presence of the latter is what gives value to the former and separates it from the agency-less state pitifully experienced by Sin.
And yet, Eve’s story (to say nothing of Satan’s) also stands as a caution against simply taking on the power of self-government without circumspection. Unrepentant revolutionary though he was, Milton was no stranger to the dangers of a quickly and simply thrown-off government, nor of an authority misused, and his nuancing of the archetype of all subsequent rebellions shows that he did not advocate rebellion as such. While Paradise Lost has influenced many revolutions (political in the 18th-century revolutions, artistic in the 19th-century Romantics, cultural in the 20th-century New Left), it nonetheless has an anti-revolutionary current. Satan’s presumptions and their later effects on Eve shows the self-blinding that is possible to those who, simply trusting their own limited perception, push for an autonomy they believe will liberate them to an unfettered reason but which will, in reality, condemn them to a solipsistic ignorance.
By treating Eve, not Adam, as the everyman character who, like the character of a morality play, represents the psychological state of the tempted individual—that is, as the character with whom the audience is most intended to sympathize—Milton elevates her to the highest status in the poem. Moreover—and of special import to Americans like myself—as an articulation of an individual citizen who does not derive the relation to an authority without consent, Eve stands as a prototype of the post-17th-century conception of the citizen that would lead not only to further changes between the British Crown and Parliament but also a war for independence in the colonies. Far from relegating Eve to a secondary place of slavish submission, Milton arguably makes her the most human character in humanity’s first story; wouldn’t that make her its protagonist? As always, let this stimulate you to read it for yourself and decide. Because it integrates so many elements—many of which might defy new readers’ expectations in their complexity and nuance—Paradise Lost belongs as much on the bookshelf and the syllabus as Shakespeare’s Complete Works, and it presents a trove for those seeking to study the intersection not only of art, history, and theology, but also of politics and gender roles in a culture experiencing a fundamental change.
