Milton's Eve: Redressing the Pandora Tradition in Paradise Lost

Abstract

This thesis argues that Milton fundamentally questions and retells the traditional misogynistic narratives of Eve in his representation of her in Paradise Lost. Milton does this by redressing Eve with the Pandora tradition, not as a means of cementing the patriarchal readings that have long followed her narrative but rather accentuating Eve’s superiority as a woman with freewill. Like Pandora in the classical and patristic traditions, who releases evil upon mankind according to Hesiod’s Theogony, Milton’s Eve is the first woman in the Hebraic-Christian tradition to bring evil into the world through the Fall. Milton employs traditional narratives, such as Genesis 1-3, the Lives of Adam and Eve, and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and long-held misogynistic perspectives, refashioning those stories to make an argument for Eve, not for her innocence or Adam’s ultimate culpability, but rather for her free will and humanity. My thesis argues that although Eve sins and shares the “forbidden fruit” with Adam, Milton portrays her as a dynamic character who experiences the stages of “growing up” attributed to humanity: in doing so, he retells one of the most pivotal religious narratives not to condemn women but to support them as mostly “equals”—different in sex, but co-lords in dominion of creation in the seventeenth-century context. The thesis focuses on Milton’s representation of Eve in Paradise Lost (with some attention given to Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Areopagitica) and goes beyond current scholarship on Milton’s Ovidian Eve to consider the reframing of earlier, mostly negative traditions and demonstrate that Eve is not simply a superior example of womanhood than her classical counterpart Pandora, but a strong wife, mother, and leader in God’s perfect creation worthy of the title “Mother of Mankind.”