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Paradise Lost Rhetorical Analysis

888 Words4 Pages

If Art Could Tell

The Sexual Politics of Innocence Evoked: Milton’s Adam and Eve

In book IV of Paradise Lost, Milton is faced with the challenge of portraying an innocent Adam and Eve -that is to say that they have yet to fall- to an audience that has already fallen, perverted by the knowledge of good and evil. Milton acknowledges the struggle of depicting the delights of Eden in lines 235-236 of book IV when describing the four rivers that run through Eden by indicating “And country whereof here needs no account/ But rather to tell how, if art could tell.” This moment of doubt on behalf of the narrator is an echo of feelings previously expressed by Milton explicitly (by calling upon heavenly muses) and implicitly in book …show more content…

On lines 285-287 of book IV, Milton describes Satan looking upon Adam and Eve: “From this Assyrian garden, where the fiend Saw undelighted all delight, all kind Of living creatures new to sight and strange: Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,”
The simple punctuation of the colon is grammatical proof that Milton is using the character Satan’s perspective of Adam and Eve as a rhetorical device- possibly to justify the fallen portrayal of the first and not-yet-corrupted man and woman: Adam and Eve. Almost immediately Milton uses this creative liberty to describe the inequalities that exist between Adam as man and Eve as woman. In lines 295-296 of book IV, Milton suggests “…though both/ Not equal, as there sex not equal seemed,” which again affirms that rather than this depiction being inherently true, it is merely what seems to be the case to the observing …show more content…

They imply that gender roles existed between man and woman long before they had even fallen from grace, yet because of the fact that this depiction of Adam and Eve is still from the viewpoint of Satan, Milton separates himself from the notion of inequality among gender and in an extreme case, seems to be implying that gender roles exist only in the eyes of the perverse making him appear (in extreme cases) to critics and scholars as a proto-feminist. Another way that Adam and Eve’s depiction in book IV of Paradise Lost could be read is that Adam and Eve were indeed not equal, not just under the subjective view of Satan, but objectively so, and that their purity, grace, and innocence lies in the inability to comprehend equality as being something with positive or negative connotations. This idea is analogous to God’s relation with the angels being that God is more powerful than the angels yet the angels (besides Satan and his followers) do not perceive this disparity in power as being a negative representation of inequality but rather a reason to be thankful to God for using his elevated power with

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