PARADISE LOST: Hierarchy

Question 1

Cultural Imposition

“Luxurious by restraint”

Answer 1

• Acts like a prophecy of the fall
  -> Growth due to cultural imposition
  -> Eve falls due to an imposition of law
• “Restraint” doesn’t control, but produce disorder
  -> John ROGERS: “Arbitrary hierarchies are the source of Eden’s imperfections”

Question 2

Alternative Possibilities
- Breaking out of the hierarchy…

1. “If this be our condition, thus to dwell // In narrow circuit straightened by a foe… how are we happy, still in fear of harm?”
2. “What is faith, love, virtue unassayed…?”

Answer 2

1.
-> “Narrow”/”straightened” - feelings of physical and intellectual confinement/control
- Part of Eve’s “desire of wandering”
- Eve = disrupter, even linguistically: “; but Eve…”
-> Feels rhetorical - critiquing Adam’s act of censorship, rejecting imposed “arbitrary hierarchies”
-> Milton uses Eve to reject Calvinist determinism, with her speech culminating in “Eden were no Eden thus exposed”

2.
-> What is ‘virtue’ if there is no possibility to resist?
- MILTON DOESN’T CONDEMN THIS INTELLECTUAL ‘WANDERING’!!! Almost direct Areopagitica quote (his pamphlet arguing against the need for books to get government approval before publishing)
-> HOWEVER! Begins to establish quest narrative, and fuse Eve with the genre he associates with Satan
- LEWALSKI: Milton uses “the HEROIC mode for Satan and his damned society”

Question 3

Equality

1. “Venturing higher than my lot”
2. “Render me more equal, and perhaps…Superior; for inferior who is free?
3. Adam rejects all of this as a “strange // Desire of wandering this unhappy morn”

Answer 3

1. Satan says eating the apple will make her Adam’s equal
   -> Eve’s desire for autonomy comes from inequality
2. Eve later seeks superiority
   -> She falls in her effort to achieve autonomy and reject imposed hierarchical restriction
   - ++pathos
   - Milton, Areopagitica, intellectual freedom, equality as all free to read
   - ROGERS GOES BEYOND - HIERARCHIES ARE THE CAUSE! “Arbitrary hierarchies are the source of Eden’s imperfections” (vs. CS Lewis)
   - Milton, Areopagitica, intellectual freedom
3. Specifically spacial
   -> Adam removes the word’s “linguistic mobility” (JR)
   - Failure of post-lapsarian language
   - Milton too uses the GENRE of Eve’s spacial wandering (CHIVALRIC) to tie it specifaclly to the fall…
   - …but arguably does not reject her INTELLECTUAL wandering in her desire to overcome imposed “arbitrary hierarchies” - therefore this kind of wandering is a by-product of the real cause - cultural imposition
   - Lines blurred as Eve arguably physically wanters to escape Adam’s imposed hierarchies