Trouble in Paradise (Lost)
In Virginia Woolf’s iconic essay cum lecture A Room of One’s Own’, we see the active power and control the 17th-century iconoclastic writer John Milton had over Woolf’s own beliefs and perceptions of her “room” that it was difficult for Woolf or other women writer’s to look past “Milton’s Bogey” and it is imperative for them to do the same otherwise they will face the same fate as the lesser-known Shakespeare, Judith.
For my belief is [and I’ll have to skip around a little bit] that if we live another century or so and have 500 a year each of us and rooms of our own, if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think, if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.
- A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
John Milton’s 12,000 line poem (divided into 12 volumes) is considered one of the greatest epics. A Miltonic retelling of the story of Lucifer’s rebellion and Garden of Eden was bound to have the institutional and structural authority that it has. Milton’s power as a figure in literary history is so prominent that a world without Milton’s influence is impossible to hypothesize.
In his early 20’s Milton had declared that he will write one such epic/play that would go on to be “the unforgettable work” and, so he did 25 odd years later, thus we see how he anticipated such power as he devoted his energy into to his future literary prowess and fame like his father, a banker might have invested into future returns.
Milton’s task of retelling the books of Genesis is the culmination of his continuous acquisition of power, the task to re-write the word of God is no mere feat, and for it to be accepted as the word of God himself is another display of authority in Milton’s pen, rather his words since he was almost blind by the time he began writing ‘Paradise Lost’.
Paraphrasing John Rogers:
There’s a real sense, I think, in which Milton wanted to re-create all of the ‘western-culture’ in his own image, thus By the end of his life, though, Milton would in effect try to rewrite everything. After he’d published all of his major poems, he began publishing a spate of works that attempted to re-create British culture from the ground up. He invented his own system of philosophical logic. He published a treatise that he had written earlier on grammar, inventing his own system for the understanding and the learning of the Latin language. He wrote a long and detailed history of Britain, attempting to create the meaning of that little island that he always assumed was God’s chosen nation. And finally, and probably for Milton most important, Milton wrote a theology, inventing in effect his own religion; and Milton’s Protestantism looks like no one else’s, before or since. And readers of Milton ever since have had to confront not just Milton’s writing but this unspeakable sense of empowerment that underlies just about everything that Milton writes.
Although Milton being in the dead center of the English Literary Canon, to Milton’s Contemporaries his power wasn’t in his aesthetic or religious, rather Socio-Political and Cultural. Despite being an anachronistic usage of the term as deemed by John Rogers, he can be considered a left-wing political radical.
Quoting John Rogers:
John Milton was a revolutionary. He was responsible for writing the first justification for an armed rebellion against a legitimate monarch, the first to publish such a work in, essentially, all of Europe. Milton actually wrote that it was the duty, not just the right but the duty, of a nation to rise up and dethrone through execution an unjust, though legitimate, king. Milton in fact was largely responsible in a cultural sense for the fact that the armed rebellion of England’s civil war, what we think of as the Puritan Revolution, actually led to the execution by decapitation of England’s monarch Charles the First in 1649. And on top of all of this political revolution, the political radicalism, Milton was one of the first intellectuals in Europe to speak out in favor not only of divorce — Milton argued for the right to divorce on grounds of incompatibility — but also he argued in favor of the right to plural marriage, polygamy. He was branded as a radical and dangerous debunker of traditional Christian family values.
And thus as stated earlier, Milton became Blind later on in his life. It is claimed by people on the pulpit that it is a way that God punishes those who try to seduce others away from his light. Quite ironic to Milton’s claim that he was the envoy to God himself while he wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ and thus the water muddies more as we delve deep into the famed epic.
Milton is always cited, invariably cited, as the canon’s most stalwart representative of oppressive religious and social values. There’s no question: Milton is the dead white male poet par excellence in English letters certainly, and his poetry works, at least from this point of view, to solidify those dead white male values, whatever those are, in the unsuspecting minds of his readers, none of whom are dead and many of whom are neither white nor male. ‘Paradise Lost’ therefore has to be seen as an active, persistently malignant conveyor of patriarchal oppression.
Milton’s Eve is shown to be excessively vain and stupid as she is seduced by Satan in the form of a Serpent to eat the apple as he wanted Eve for himself or no one at all. And so he approached her with flattery and it worked. Eve ate the apple in hopes of becoming more equal, “and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior; for, inferior, who is free.” and thus she seduced Adam as she could not bear the fact that he would get to live another Eve when she is dead. Adam having realized that she was “defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!” He then made up his mind to join her in sin and death. “Certain my resolution is to die: / How can I live without thee!”
Milton’s female characters not only rationalize their mistakes with their own, innate weakness but also lay some blame on their husbands, expecting them to be more responsible even though they gave the women too much freedom despite their flighty tendencies. Eve explaining to Adam that she is only a weak woman who didn’t know any better.
In Genesis, why did Eve eat the apple? it doesn’t say but it’s clear what narrative Milton tried to push on his readers and that poor Adam’s only sin was loving his wife (more than his god) and thus maybe that’s why feminists like Woolf find trouble in accepting Milton’s radicalism as anything that not is the norm in canonical literature’s deep-rooted patriarchy.
For someone as revered as Milton, it is not unusual for him to be the proponent of the age-old perception of women. Eve is held responsible for the fall, for death itself, and has caused women to have to make it up to men or prove their abilities even today.
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