Is there a book more widely loved than Paradise Lost by an author more universally disliked than John Milton? Catholics dislike Milton for his anti-Catholicism, Anglicans dislike him for his nonconformity, monarchs dislike him for his republicanism, republicans dislike him for his religiosity, and feminists dislike him for his supposed misogyny. Samuel Johnson captured the sentiment of many in saying that Milton’s “predominant desire was to destroy.” But Paradise Lost? Johnson writes that it is, “A poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place … among the productions of the human mind.”
In his “biography” of Paradise Lost, which is part of Princeton University Press’s excellent Lives of Great Religious Books series, Alan Jacobs traces Johnson’s and others’ responses to Milton and his most famous poem. Jacobs gives special attention to two that are especially long-standing: that Paradise Lost shows Milton’s special hatred of women, and that the common denominator that explains the poet’s work is Milton’s hatred of authority. The first, Jacobs argues, is an oversimplification. The second, which usually goes hand-in-hand with the view that Satan is the real hero of the poem, is simply wrong.
Milton’s views of women were certainly not progressive, but it seems unlikely that he had an extraordinary hatred of the opposite sex. Milton’s history with women was complex, and Jacobs suspects that the response to Eve in the poem has been unduly colored by what little we know of Milton’s first marriage and of his youngest daughter, Deborah. His first wife returned to her father’s house shortly after she and Milton were married, but returned after three years, and as an aged Milton was going blind, he made his daughters read to him in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which he taught them to pronounce but not understand. Deborah is reported to have said her father believed that “one tongue is enough for a woman” and that he was a miser and taskmaster. Yet, Milton was also devoted to his second wife, Katherine, who died in childbirth, and his marriage to his third and final wife, Elizabeth Minshull, was, by her own account, a happy one.
The first critic to accuse Milton of misogyny was Johnson. In Life of Milton, Johnson writes that there “appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings … He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.” This charge, Jacobs writes, is “pursued most fiercely and at greatest length by Robert Graves in his novel Wife to Mr. Milton (1943)” and by modern critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Milton’s Eve is inferior to Adam. In book 4 of Paradise Lost, Milton states clearly that they are “not equal”:
For contemplation he and valour formed,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.
Jacobs writes, “Even in her unfallen state … Eve is not capable of self-government; she is made by God in such a way that she requires Adam to set her on the proper path, because without him she will surely take the wrong one.”
Is this evidence of “a Turkish contempt for women,” which is to say, one that exceeds the view of Milton’s own time? Jacobs is not convinced, and neither am I. Milton’s original readers would not have been shocked by the passage above. In fact, by “not equal,” Milton seems to mean that they were different — Adam was made for “valour,” Eve for “attractive grace.” The creation of Eve in the poem, as in Genesis, comes about because Adam cannot find his true equal among the animals. He needs a being with whom he can share “all rational delight.” After all, “Among unequals what society / Can sort, what harmony or true delight?” And so, God creates Eve.
Eve is even superior to Adam in at least one way in the poem. After Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam blames Eve for giving him the fruit and God for making Eve. However, Eve simply takes responsibility for her sin and is the first to seek reconciliation. “While yet we live,” she tells Adam, “between us two let there be peace.” In the poem, Jacobs writes, it is with “Eve’s initial offering of grace that the history of redemption begins.”
The response to Paradise Lost that Jacobs examines at length is the popular Romantic view that Satan is the real hero of the poem and that Milton was of “the Devil’s party,” as William Blake put it. John Dryden was the first to suggest that Satan was the real hero of Paradise Lost, which Blake repeats in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1790, followed, of course, by William Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here is how Godwin described Satan in 1793:
“A man of quick resentment, of strong feelings, and who pertinaciously resists everything that he regards as an unjust assumption, may be considered as having in him the seeds of eminence. Nor is it easily to be conceived that such a man should not proceed from a sense of justice to some degree of benevolence; as Milton’s hero felt real compassion and sympathy for his partners in misfortune.”
“I see no evidence of Satan’s compassion for his fellow rebels,” Jacobs remarks, and he argues rightly that there is little evidence in the poem itself that Satan is the hero. Satan is captivating, and he certainly does have all the best lines. However, this is because evil is captivating, so much so that we often confuse it with good. Milton noted this in his notebooks after he visited Italy (and met Galileo). “In moral evil,” he wrote, “much good may be mixed, and that with singular craft.”
Jacobs seems to share Stanley Fish’s view of the poem as a “powerful stimulus-response device,” which elicits, and subsequently critiques, a variety of responses, including sympathy with Satan. The poem “whispers” to us, Jacobs writes, “This is how you feel … but is this how you want to feel … Are you pleased with yourself for feeling this way — or distressed?”
Yet, even these Romantic misreadings of the poem are preferable to the Victorian responses, Jacobs argues. These transformed Paradise Lost into a “classic” that was frequently praised but infrequently read: “In their various ways, Addison, and the Godwins and the Shelleys … all hear and respond to this whisper. Only those who condescendingly name Paradise Lost an ‘English classic’ refuse the invitation altogether. They make sure that they don’t hear a sound.”
Jacobs concludes with a brief survey of contemporary responses to the poem and finds that we are more like our Victorian ancestors than the Romantics in our approach to the poem. Allusions to Paradise Lost in film and television are easy enough to find, but they show no real engagement with the poem. References to Milton’s title abound in books, but they “do not in any way suggest the cultural currency of the poem … They are nearly free-floating signifiers: they bear at most a vague penumbra of exile and guilt.”
However, Jacobs does find some cause for hope in the growing popularity of the poem in foreign languages. Paradise Lost has been translated into more languages in the last 30 years than in the last three centuries. This is likely true for many 16th- and 17th-century works, but one looks for hope where one can, I suppose, in today’s frequently hellish intellectual environment.
Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.