Eve & Sin In Media Res: the Epic Sex of Paradise Lost

“Those male, these feminine.
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.

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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.

Paradise Lost begins in media res, just after Satan has fallen from heaven but before he becomes the biblical Satan who temps Eve and then Christ (a point which draws a stronger connection for Christ as a second Eve rather than as a second Adam), yet as events unfold it becomes clear that the whole epic is structured by the sense of indeterminacy offered by existing in the middle of things. Indeed, the realization of the perpetual tension between possible truths, potential trajectories, and multiple desires is what sparks Satan's decision to become the inconstant tricker and tempter. "Me miserable!" he confesses before entering Eden, "which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire / Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell" (IV.73-75). The wrathful truth of heaven or the despair of meaninglessness in Hell are both impossible choices for him. They exist as poles that he finds himself temporally and geographically located in between and between which he constantly moves. This is his power and his curse: mutability. There is no escape from the indeterminacy of his post-fallen state because, like it or not, it defines him as a creature ever caught in media res.

 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

Featuring characters who can assume the state of "either sex" or "both" at once, it is perhaps not surprising that the key male characters of the epic find themselves in the trans position of being pregnant men, each in turn giving birth to indeterminately gendered children. The first birth in Paradise Lost we discover in media res, as Satan meets his daughter at the gates of Hell. Realizing that he, and the reader, are not aware of the gestation that had just taken place, Sin describes the circumstances of her own birth. As Satan was in the midst of battle, she tells him, "All on a sudden miserable pain / Surprisd thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzie swumm / In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast / Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide" (752-755). By the work of heaven, Satan body opens up (like Adam's left side in Eden and later Eve's body after her fall) giving it an organ for reproduction. "Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright," Sin describes, comparing herself to Satan, "Then shining Heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd / Out of thy head I sprung" (756-758). Gesturing at once to Athena's birth from Jove's head and Eve's creation from Adam's left side, Sin springs fully armed. She describes herself as a mirror image of Satan in form and force. Sin is a bright spirit and a warrior with the same potential as Satan to take on a feminine role as mother and a masculine role as revolutionary. 

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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More lesson plans from 

the Genealogy of Gender & Genre

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Transvestite Metaphysics in Roman de Silence (Pt 2)

"There is great unity 

between man and woman, 

because the two 

are of one substance"

Roman de Silence
Heldris of Cornwall

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The following is a transcript of a paper,
"Transvestite Metaphysics: Quantum Entanglement and Natural Philosophy in 13th century Literature," delivered at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 
in Orlando, Florida. March 18-22, 2015.

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Transvestite Metaphysics

What is the alternative to a modern Scientism that doesn't account for the gender implications of its ideologies and excludes transgender from its theory of everything? Towards this goal of thinking science and biopolitics together, we need to turn to a period before science was industrialized and institutionalized as a distinct discipline from other university fields like philosophy, literature and politics. Looking at the 13th century, science may look starkly different on the surface, astronomy was astrology, chemistry was alchemy, but this lack of modern disciplinarity meant that scientists did more than how we would narrowly consider science. I argue that a critical return to medieval quantum physics of the 13th century, through the metaphysical thought of John Duns Scotus and the trans ontology in Roman de Silence, offers a pre-modern approach to science and biopolitics where matter and meaning, body and clothing, science and culture are not essentially divided but fundamentally entangled at a quantum level.

Medieval scientists knew their Aristotle and practiced metaphysics, poetics, politics, alongside their physics. Indeed, some may be surprised to learn that quantum physics not only existed but grew up in the medieval period, stemming back to Artistotle’s metaphysical treatises where he defined a quantum object as "that which is divisible into two or more constituent parts of which is by nature a 'one' and a 'this'" (Aristotle, Metaphysics V, ch. 13, 1020a 8-10). This theory became fundamental to medieval theories of everything where thinkers like Duns Scotus were trying to bring together physical observations of a world of diverse gender and genus with the physical and metaphysical assertion that all matter derives from a single substance – be it the atom, energy, or God - wherein “the whole time and the parts of motion are joined to some ‘mutated being’ which is not one in the same motion” (Scotus, V.X). In his Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Book VII, Question XIII, Duns Scotus proposes the following theory of everything: each body shares a common “that-ness” (quiddity) or substance but manifests a distinct “this-ness” (haecceity) where body (such as clothing) can become entangled with other bodies (such as the skin) on a quantum level so that attributes of the one can be "transferred to other things also" (Aristotle, V, ch. 13, 1020a 8-10). 

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Duns Scotus's Quantum Realism

What does Duns Scotus’s quantum theory mean and how does it marry a scientific theory of everything with medieval gender politics? Turning to a contemporary Chivalric romance, the Roman de Silence, we find the author of this highly literate genre writing a text for a highly educated audience that would have known their Aristotle and Duns Scotus and been paying attention for how unique individuals can co-exist within wider theories of everything. Silence is a romance about a child born female in a time when English law forbade women from inheriting property, so the parents raise Silence as a man, putting him in armor and training him to be a knight. This text, often noted for its so called transvestism, demonstrates how medieval literature was not distinct from physical and metaphysical treatises by introducing the characters of Nature and Nurture into the plot in order to debate and affect Silence as he/she transforms not only his body but society’s sense of body and clothes, matter and meaning, thing and everything.

Nature arrives in two key moments in the narrative when Silence undergoes substantial changes to his/her body, during which time the concept of “Tolte” (Totalness) becomes critical to the debate between gender and genus over the transgender body. The first occurs at Silence’s birth, when Nature takes undifferentiated quantum “matter” that is “beautiful and pure" [Li matere est et biele er pure], then “goes to her coffer [secre va] and opens it up. / She has at least a million molds there, / and she has very great need of them, / for if she had only one form / everyone would be alike [la samblance estroit si commune / de tolte gente] / that no one would ever be able to tell / who was who or what their name was" (1865-1892). This idea of “tolte” invoked here, where a single substance with many molds fits well with Duns Scotus’s theory of entanglement where every “this” (individual) co-exists at a quantum level with “that” essential substance. "Nothing," states Duns Scotus, "is itself one greater than a unity proper to it" (Duns Scotus VII. QXIII.209). This univocality of being, put into contemporary language means that 'everything equally exists but not everything exists equally.' The 'tolte' of everything only exists as the sum of all differences plus the single unifying substance. It is emphatically positive / additive. There is no universal without particulars but nor are there particulars without a unifying quantum essence.

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Theories of Tolte

The medieval theory of “tolte” relates to the theory of everything but is distinctly conscious to the “this-ness” and the “thatness” for embodiment and biopolitics. In English totle means Total but comes from the “Old French total, from Medieval Latin totalis "entire, total" (as in summa totalis "sum total"), from Latin totus "all, all at once, the whole, entire, altogether," of unknown origin.” (Online Etymological Dictionary). It is critical then that Nature puts her single pure substance into diverse forms "both big and little [grans et petites] / ugly, misshapen, and perfect [laides contrefaites, parfites[, / for thus all people [tolte gent] are fashioned, / big and little, handsome and fine [grant et petit, et biel, et gent], / she has so many different [diverse] forms,/ but one mold she [Nature] has kept aside / she has never used yet." (1895-1901). The idea that Nature has molds for “tolte gents” means that the medieval quantum theory of totle gives critical attention to singularity, diversity, politics of embodiment when it theorizes everything. This means that not only the trans(vestite) body is an artificial construct, even when Nature is doing the constructing, because all bodies are objects of specific subjective choices. Nature falls from the station of a transcendent signifier (i.e. God as Creator) because each person "grant et petit" are made with reference to the "tolte gents." Particular persons are only particular because they exist in a state of exception from everyone else. The everything being referenced is formed by adding up each particular into the universal.

In particular, Roman de Silence looks to understand the place of trans bodies in their theories of tolte by establishing Nature’s quantum approach to gender from the start. "Jesus the pious, true, and good / created Adam [Adan], thus we know to be true,” we learn from the text, “and right away created Eve [Evain] from his rib. / And here is the hidden reason, / why he made her from his rib: / so that they would be of one mind [voellance], / as they are made of one substance. / Both should be of one mind [voloir], / united in joy and sorrow [a l'esjoir, et al doloir]. / There is great unity [grant commune] between man and woman, / because the two are of one substance" (1701-1712). Here the one quantum substance can take the form of multiple genders with political implications, suggesting the formation of distinctly transgender bodies but also calling for ontological solidarity across gender where we fight for each other, “united in joy and sorrow.” Trans bodies cannot be considered mere "accidents" or "particular" exceptions that can be thought separate from universal metaphysical questions. The relation of the one to the all remains as critical as ever. Rather, the trans body becomes the embodiment of an ontological solidarity. By examining the "tolte gents" through the story of a trans body, universal theories become more important. Furthermore, through this common cause in the "tolte," each particular becomes implicated in the existence and politics of each other particular. Power and knowledge (i.e. "voellance") over individual persons or subgroups, like transgender, is necessarily bound to understandings of the "tolte" universe.

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De-Natured Reality

By Nature’s final reappearance in Roman de Silence it is evident that there are problems in any theory of everything insofar as it attempts to root authority in Nature and the natural sciences in ways that can produce the Scientism of Cooper, becoming trained to think in terms of fixed universals that they take the forms of gender they know as the single authoritative realness. Nature, although she knows that Nurture or other forms may craft bodies, when Silence begins to age and be transformed into a man, she complains, "When I heaped all the beauty I had stored up upon you alone … I used a special mold for you / when I created you with my own hands" (2505-2508) [et la bialtet qu'ai tant cele ai tolte en toi amoncelee… car une special forme ai / dont a mes ii mains te formai]. The claim that she put all the beauty in the universe in Silence, “tolte en toi,” reflects Duns Scotus’s claims about all of the “that-ness” of the universe in any specific “this.” "As one is coextensive with being," writes Duns Scotus, "so each mode of 'one' is coextensive with some grade of being, to which grade this mode of unity is proper" (VII.xiii). Contrary to the Nominalists of late medieval metaphysics or individualists of modern politics, no particular body can exist without being formed by, of, and with the "tolte en toi." While that coextensive being manifests particular modes of relation to each body, the work of that mode (or grade) to substantiate each thing with unity is necessary. 

Over the course of Roman de Silence, the trans man puts on masculine attire, armor and shields transforming his cultural signification but also his humoral biology. The tournaments and training that goes with armor, “took him out often in the scorching heat / in order to make a man of him. / He was so used to men's usage / and had so rejected women's ways" (2472-2474). The French here is key: rhyming “heat” (“halle”) with “man” (“malle”) and female behavior (“use”) with refuse (“feme refuse”). Beyond performatively re-aligning his gender it is also physically reconstructing. "I have a mouth too hard for kisses / and arms too tough for embraces,” notes Silence, “One could easily make a fool of me / in any games under the covers, / for I'm a young man, not a girl" (2646-2650). Medieval science of the body regarded gender as more than about genitals, including facial features, skin, body frame and humors (what we may now call hormones) as equally key in determining gender and equally available for sexual reconstruction.  According to Duns Scotus's quantum principle of the univocality of being, While the power of each may exist unequally, both equally exist. The particulars of these attributes linked with transvestism cannot be discounted as non-real. The particular masculinity of Silence, like skin, is coextensive with other attributes of his gender, like genitals. Nature is coextensive with Nurture. Through the work of Nurture, Silence can refuse and de-nature Nature's work, but cannot exist outside of dialog with the tolte that forms him.

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Nurture's Entanglement

What we end up with in Roman de Silence, is a medieval quantum theory of tolte (everything) that at once includes gender in its considerations but leaves room for the dissent of other authorities, including those of Nurture, representing, among others, the word of clothes, culture, literature and the humanities. Unlike the modern debate, the divide is not between constructionism and essentialism but between two different forms of essentialism: the fixed forms of Nature and the reconstructed bodies of Nurture. "I have completely denatured her,” claims Nurture, “She will always resist you." (2594-2595). [Jo l'ai tolte desnaturee. / N'avra ja voir o vus duree]. Nurture is still speaking of metaphysical quantum theories of “tolte.” She is “tolte desnaturee,” connected with everything but it no longer is under the lone authority of Nature (or the Natural Sciences). This is how metaphysics becomes biopolitical. Who and what gets to count as "real" is inextricable from political subjectivity. There are benefits for certain people for certain things to be considered real or proper to a certain form, while other alternative forms of reality may challenge their claim over bodies, properties, and power. Whether it is Nature claiming control over a body, or Sheldon Cooper claiming power-knowledge over a body in the name of natural science, there are things which parties can gain or lose by affirming these versions of reality and discounting alternative realities. In both the 21st and 13th century, the trans woman become metaphysically real while resisting tyrannical authorities of gender.

Resistance is not the same as power, however, as Nature then, as Natural sciences today still possess overwhelming authority over how bodies are managed and understood. After a successful life as a trans man, the knight is undone by the King of England. "He ordered Silence to be undressed [despollier]. / It was just as Merlin had said: / he found everything in its proper place” (6571-6574). This traumatic violence of stripping a trans person naked in public in order to humiliate them into submitting to natural forms of gender is powerful but is also resisted. The final like “tolt issi l'a trove par tolt" may mean, total is there is for total, affirming a naturalistic theory of everything, but in French we see nurture’s alternative suggested in the pun in Medieval Latin “tolta,” the act of taking away (Merriam Webster) or classic Latin “tolta,” wrong (Latin Dictionary). The line may read, “wrong is there for wrong” or “taken away is that which is taken away.” Nature asserts what is real so as to exclude things when defining its theory of everything.  This is the fundamental claim of Duns Scotus's univocal quantum being. "For if one removed from A [Silence] only that whereby it would be divisible (i.e. its haecceity)," writes Duns Scotus, "what remains (i.e. the nature) would be repugnant to being divided" (VII, xiii). In other words, to attempt to return the particulars of Silence's life back into an original quantum unity cannot occur without taking away what makes Silence particular . Silence, as a particular "this," cannot exist without the universe of gender, a real "that," but neither can "that" universe exist without the particular "this" of Silence.

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Naked Science?

Is the answer then to look to medieval philosophy for our science? Should poets, literary critics, and gender studies scholars take over the grants reserved for theoretical physics? The answer is not so simple as deconstruction the artifice of naturalism or scientism to return to a naked truth. The work of construction and re-construction is ever present. This is the haunting lack of resolution at the end of the horrifying stripping of the trans knight in Roman de Silence. While this movement of power/knowledge is supposed to fix theories of Silence's body and gender, it only adds to the insufficiency of Nature as solitary authority. "After Nature / had recovered her rights," concludes Le Roman, "she spent the next three days refinishing [repolit]/ Silence's entire body, removing every trace / of anything that being a man left there [le cors de malle]." (6669-6673). Removing the clothes does not reveal a pure truth of the body. The effects of the clothes remain entangled on the body. Silence can return to the form Nature made her, but it is not merely a deconstruction (de-polit) but a reconstruction (repolit). Indeed, the emphasis on the need to remake the whole body, "Par tolt le cors et a tolir," emphasizes how the work of Nurture never leaves the "tolt" being considered. Masculinity is not a part of the whole which can be nullified as not-real but a pervasive methodology which effects every part of every body, "tolt quanque ot sot le corse de malle." The pun at the end of the line suggesting that the masculine body, "le corse de malle," is also the wrong body, "le corse de mal," plays at this tension set up from the statement that men and women share a common substance. Masculinity cannot be expunged from femininity, just like reality of womanhood cannot be fully distinguished from the non-reality of the transvestite. The "tolt le cors" cannot be understood without reference to the sum of all participating realities of Silence's gender. The feminine now is not longer the single authorial Silence, it exists as a product or re-production from a trans masculine.

The desire to strip down the universe or transvestites in particular is implicit in many attempts at scripting a theory of everything where the final word can be given on knowledge and with it the power forever fixed in the hands of he who holds it. Yet there is no naked science. There ever remains something excludes from out theories of everything, no theory nor theorist can account for "tolte" everything and everything constantly changes as new particulars come into being, so we must embrace, unlike Sheldon our entanglement and dependency in other bodies and other disciplines, be they theoretical physics, geologists, poets, literary critics, and gender studies, modern and medieval, asking who or what are we leaving out now, if we look to bridge matter and meaning, body and clothes, nature and nurture, this and that, real and unreal in our transvestite metaphysics. Transvestism always looks to add things together rather than make everything naked. A transvestite metaphysics is a science of the tolte which takes its own power-knowledge production into account and looks towards what it excludes to add more and more to the productive contact of coextenstivity. The fundamental quantum move becomes one of reaching out to other genders, time periods, and departments to share ideas, methodologies, authorities, products, and funding if one is to truly claim a desire to construct a "tolte" theory of everything.

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More Quantum Theory & Trans Knights in Estoire de Merlin

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