“Those male, these feminine.
For Spirits when they please
can either Sex assume, or both ”
For Spirits when they please
can either Sex assume, or both ”
Paradise Lost
John Milton
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Introduction to English Literature 1
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre
In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre
In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.
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Between Heaven and Hell
Narrative at once works to explain bodies according to specific genders and genres and as a creative project also helps shape them. In this way, gender and genre are more than etymologically linked but can share a direct causal relationship. What then does an "epic" gender look like? By examining the characters of Paradise Lost through the epic narrative trait of writing in media res (in the middle of things), we can see how its key female characters, Eve and Sin, become defined by a fundamental indeterminacy, caught between roles of submission and independence, daughter and mother, heavenly spirit and hellish sinner. Although Paradise Lost centers around its male characters, Satan and Adam, it is only through the agency of women that the plot is able to move forward. Indeed, not only do women mirror the masculine power over shapeshifting, they potentially exceed the men in their mutability. The inconstancy of women functioned as a characteristic of female inferiority, but as the epic in media res of the epic demonstrates, all bodies share a common instability between choices, roles, and trajectories that open up a critical space between the tyranny of assumed origins and predestined conclusions.
In his first famous speech, concluding with the call for his defeated forces to "awake, arise, or be forever fallen" Satan rouses the sense of a perpetual revolution of form and power by affirming a sense of cosmic mutability. "The mind is its own place," argues Satan, "and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n" (I.254-255). One change has already happen, the fall, materialized in the shift in heavenly to infernal settings. Yet more changes may take place. By calling on the spirits to embrace a change of mind, they may exercise power by changing the meaning of their circumstances. "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n," Satan asserts (I.263). Likewise, the bodies of the spirits will soon change in turn. The text provides a general sense of the new names and features of the fallen angels but admits that this too is not fixed. There “Those male, these feminine," the text narratives, but adds that they can not only shift between mental states but sexes as well. "For Spirits when they please / can either Sex assume, or both ” (I.422-424). This statement occurs briefly in the first book yet transforms how we read the rest of the epic. While most of the main characters present as male, they are no more stable or fixed in their position or embodiment of gender than its female characters: Sin and Eve.
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Satan and Sin
No sooner was Sin born than Satan shifted back into a paternal role, as if to reassert his masculinity, he places sin in a subordinate female role by penetrating her and making her into a mother. "I pleas'd, and with attractive graces won / The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft / Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing / Becam'st enamour'd," she confesses, "and such joy thou took'st / With me in secret, that my womb conceiv'd / A growing burden" (762-767). Underlining her similarity to Satan, Sin demonstrates how this union is not merely incestuous its practically masturbatory. This has implications for Sin's pregnancy. That Satan becomes the father and Sin the mother is not predestined. Given their spiritual nature and Satan's evident ability to bear and issue forth life from his both, either might take on either role. While the plot follows reader's expectations of Satan as masculine and Sin as feminine, the text nonetheless stresses this likeness to suggest a mutual sexual indeterminacy.
Indeed, Sin fights and falls beside Satan as a comrade in arms, gaining her name along with him and then taking on a co-rulership over Hell. He becomes marked as Satan, the Enemy, in battle. She becomes marked as "Sin" when "All th' Host of Heav'n back they recoild affraid / At first... and for a Sign / Portentous held me" (759-761). Sin's appearance suggests the eruption of mutability, change, and revolution that Satan's opposition has generated. No long is eternity fixed but now open to many more falls and transformations. While Paradise Lost focuses on Satan's fall, it is not an isolated event, but one collaborated by Sin's fall. "Driv'n headlong from the Pitch of Heaven," narrates Sin, "down / Into this Deep, and in the general fall / I also;" (772-774). Adding "I also" just after the split not only highlights the importance of the fall as a collective ("general") event but stresses the start of the next line, "I also" just before it ends with a semi-colon. Sin shared in Satan's form, sexuality, battle, and defeat. Satan in turn becomes a prince of hell, tempting more to enter through its gates, yet even he must submit to Sin's power over the liminal space of the gate. Arriving in Hell, Sin is given her position of power, "at which time this powerful Key / Into my hand was giv'n, with charge to keep / These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass / Without my op'ning" (772-777). She determines who enters and who leaves. In turn, her body will become the womb of Death and by him many more children. Sin generates possibilities for mutability. This involves death but also change. Likewise, as gatekeeper of Hell, she uses her position in media res to control others, including men, even Satan.
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Adam and Eve
In Rabbinical lore, some hold that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As in Aristophane's myth of the three sexes and three sexualities in Plato's Symposium, a male-female pair logically comes from dividing a body composed of both genders. Indeed, of the many ways that two humans could have been formed, creation through division is suggestive conclusion for the authors of Genesis and Paradise Lost. In one sense, the division changes (and thus creates) both Adam and Eve. Each are made of the original flesh yet not identical to it. In another sense, if one wishes to stress Adam's relative constancy through the generation of Eve, at very least Adam functions like Satan as a mother's body that is opened up to reproduce life. In Book VII, Adam recounts just how this happens. "Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape [God] / Still glorious before whom awake I stood," recounts Adam, Who stooping op'nd my left side, and took / From thence a Rib, with cordial spirits warme, / And Life-blood streaming fresh" (463-467). Like the loss of blood in childbirth, and Satan's birth of Sin, a part of his body is taken through a hole in his left side produced by heavenly forces. Although held up as humanity's father, in this moment, before any other children, he (or at least his body) takes on the fleshly shape and role of a mother.
The generation of Eve as a woman, then, occurs at the same time that Adam is affirmed as a man, a synchronicity that affirms the shared likeness and indeterminacy of the two. "[W]ide was the wound," continues Adam, "But suddenly with flesh fill'd up and heal'd: / The Rib he formd and fashond with his hands; / Under his forming hands a Creature grew, / Manlike, but different sex" (468-470). At the same moment that Adam's flesh is being knit together, Eve's body is also taking on a new shape. Indeed, the double meaning of calling Eve "manlike," signifying both a common humanity and gender with Adam, that adding the tag "but different sex" seems to add clarification. In fact, it tells us little about who is the more conventionally masculine or feminine in body or appearance. Although there is a differentiation of nouns and pronouns, neither's bodies are described (in the Bible or Paradise Lost) until after the fall of humanity. The text gives qualities which are common to both and abstract rather than defining the shape of their flesh, "so lovly faire, / That what seemd fair in all the World, seemd now
Mean, / or in her summ'd up, in her containd" (471-473). We learn of Eve's beauty, which is to say her aesthetic value and sense of wholeness; a totality which seems to include all things and thus by extension all genders. In many ways, the text does more to affirm their likeness than there difference. Eve is describe as consubstantial to Adam by Adam, "Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my Self / Before me; Woman is her Name, of Man / Extracted; for this cause he shall forgoe / Father and Mother, and to his Wife adhere; / And they shall be one Flesh, one Heart, one Soule" (495-499). By the end of the description of Eve's birth, Adam has all but convinced the reader that their bodies share more than hold apart. Properly, one should consider them together rather than separate one as existing prior or above the other by their relation to "Father and Mother." Who after all is this Father and Mother? It could be God, parent of all, in which case the divine becomes associated (like all Spirits) as both masculine and feminine. And/Or, God could be like flesh, and Adam made in His/Her image. The Adam that exists prior to the divide could be considered both Mother and Father since he reproduces asexually. Or, yet again, Adam could be the Mother that bears the creation of God (here figured as a Father). In any case, Adam and Eve constitute a whole but indeterminate body that seems able to slip between the forms and positions of sex.
Like Satan, as soon as Adam gives birth to Eve and witnesses their likeness, he immediately asserts his sex (qua masculinity) by taking a dominant position in sex (qua intercourse). "To the Nuptial Bowre / I led her blushing like the Morn" (510-511). Eve's blushing and need to be led by Adam supposedly signifies the natural passivity of her sex and sexuality. From this Adam proposes that despite their like appearance, Eve is in fact secondary in creation and station. "For well I understand in the prime end," Adam admits of Eve, "Of Nature her th' inferiour, in the mind / And inward Faculties, which most excell, / In outward also her resembling less / His Image who made both, and less expressing / The character of that Dominion" (540-546). Again, both Adam and Eve are now products both of a hermaphroditic first creature and/or Creator. Yet, Adam differentiates between his body which lacks a rib and hers which was made of that rib. In the beginning they are the same and "in the prime end" they are different. Yet what of that transformative middle space, in media res, where they are formed and seem to continue to transform together?
Once Adam lets go of Eve sexually, and they get on to other business, she begins to assert her like powers of self-governance and her ability to chose (for better or worse) the many potential changes she may undergo and influence. "Let us divide our labours," she begins on morning, "thou where choice / Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind / The Woodbine round this Arbour, or direct / The clasping Ivie where to climb, while I / In yonder Spring of Roses intermixt /With Myrtle, find what to redress till Noon" (214-219). Each of them have been created to work Eden and while Adam pushes for them to work together like they do in bed, mutually and yet with him on top, Eve asserts her own ability to control her body and the world it can shape. Adam tries to instill in her fear over the vulnerability of her body, yet Eve presses back with an affirming of her own masculine-like constancy. "Let us not then suspect our happie State," Eve asserts, "Left so imperfet by the Maker wise, / As not secure to single or combin'd. / Fraile is our happiness, if this be so, / And Eden were no Eden thus expos'd" (337-341). Like Satan who asserts that he embodies Hell, Eve claims that she embodies Eden. If Eden is a place of constancy, then so is she; as much as Adam. If, however, Eden now exists in a state of mutability, where change has happened and may occur again, positioning Eden and its occupants in media res, then both Adam and Eve are open to many potential futures. Whatever those futures may be, Sin and Eve become gatekeepers to unleash further change for the cosmos. Thus, while women become dually responsible for the fall of humanity, so too are they mothers and fathers of all the new things that take shape in the course of all that follows: more falls, salvation, and the indeterminacy that allows for the possibility and power of choice.
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