The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

Author:Stephen Greenblatt
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

the more to draw his Love,

And render me more equal, and perhaps,

A thing not undesirable, sometime

Superior: for inferior who is free? (9:822–25)

Milton almost certainly understood that last question as a sign of something seriously amiss in Eve, a corruption that had already begun to occur in the wake of her transgression. And yet the humans who emerged in his imagination had achieved enough independent reality to insist on the force of their claims. Eve had reason to believe that Adam did not want to love an inferior, and even that an occasional reversal of hierarchical order, with the woman on top, would be “not undesirable.”

In the end, Eve decided to share with Adam—she could not bear the thought that she might after all die and that Adam would then wed “another Eve.” And Adam? Adam, in Milton’s conception, was not deceived. He understood at once that Eve had made a catastrophic mistake, but he immediately decided to share her fate. “How can I live without thee?” He refused to accept the official superiority that had been conferred upon him; she was for him the “last and best/Of all God’s works.” And he refused to accept what he intuited would be the official solution: to have God “create another Eve.” Even, as Adam put it to himself, could he afford another rib, the loss of the woman he loved would never leave him.

Adam’s decision to eat the fruit completed the disaster of Original Sin. It was followed, in Milton’s vision, by mutual intoxication and intense sexual pleasure that then gave way to the bitterness of shame. The marital intimacy, so subtly drawn in its complexity before the Fall, disintegrated into recrimination and misery. Adam’s long lament—why did I do what I did? how can I bear the weight of my guilt? what is to become of me?—culminated in rage when Eve tried to approach him. He vehemently repelled her: “Out of my sight, thou serpent” (9:867).

In Adam’s mind Eve had become indistinguishable from the hated agent of their ruin, and the sight of her—as Milton wrote in the divorce tracts—brought him only a sense of “trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel.” Bitterly unhappy, the first man would, Milton was sure, have descended into a loathing not of Eve alone but of all womankind. “Why did God,” Adam asked himself, create “This novelty on Earth, this fair defect/Of nature” (10:891–92)? Why should he or any man find himself married to an “adversary, his hate or shame?”

But if at this point Milton tapped into his own most toxic feelings in the wake of the breakdown of his marriage, he also remembered the moment in which he let those feelings go. He recalled the occasion in his friends’ house in London when the woman who had, as he believed, deeply wronged him knelt at his feet and begged his pardon. Eve, not repulsed by Adam’s misogynistic reproaches,

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