Milton's Ovidian Eve by Mandy Green;

Author:Mandy Green; [Green, Mandy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781317095880
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

... had the Image of God bin equally common to them both [i.e. to woman as well as to man], it had no doubt bin said, In the image of God created he them. But St Paul ends the controversie by explaining that the woman is not primarily and immediatly the image of God, but in reference to the man. The head of the woman, saith he, I Cor. II. is the man: he the image and glory of God, she the glory of the man: he not for her but she for him. (Col. 4.76)

The balanced rhythm and wording of the final line seem especially telling, and encourage a reading of the passage as a gloss upon the equivalent line from the epic (IV.299). The couple’s first lesson in Eden apparently illuminates this hierarchy of value in which feminine “beauty is excelld by manly grace / And wisdom” (IV.490–491).33 Accordingly, if “the mind / And inward Faculties ... most excell” then it follows, Adam reasons, that Eve is “inferiour” to him “in the prime end / Of Nature” (VIII.540–542). Nevertheless Adam himself finds it difficult to sustain this assessment of their relative importance in the divine scheme, as we have seen. For although Adam more directly resembles God’s image, yet, of the two, Eve is indisputably the ”Fairest resemblance of [their] Maker faire” (IX.538, emphasis added). Adam clearly finds the implications of her superior beauty unsettling; it seems excessive to him. “Too much of Ornament” (VIII.538) has been bestowed upon her, making him feel inadequate as a consequence. Indeed, in Adam’s eyes, Eve is

33 Ironically, it is Eve, of course, who draws this lesson; Adam paints a rather different picture in which “Wisdom in discourse with [beauty] / Looses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shewes” (VIII.552–3). ... so lovly faire,

That what seemd fair in all the World, seemed now

Mean, or in her summd up, in her containd. (VIII.471–3)

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