Palestra REC (10/06)
Milton’s introduction of Adam and Eve in Book Four of Paradise Lost is notorious for its insistence on the superiority of the first man over the first woman. When speaking of God’s purpose in creating Adam and creating Eve, the narrator is apparently unequivocal when insisting that “He,” Adam, was created “for God only, she for God in him.” Milton, it will be argued, brings to his understanding of Edenic sexism a careful, but easily missed, distinction among multiple theories of sexual inequality. The interplay among ontological, theological, cultural, and political assertions of masculine “excellence” produces confusion not just for the reader, but for Adam and Eve themselves. And that confusion is an essential component of some of the most serious religious commitments of the poem.
