Milton's Ovidian Eve

250 Pages·2009·3.29 MB·English

by  Mandy Green

Milton’s Ovidian Eve
Mandy Green
Milton’s ovidian EvE
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Milton’s ovidian Eve
Mandy GrEEn
Durham University, UK
© Mandy Green 2009
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Mandy Green has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, designs and Patents act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Green, Mandy
Milton’s ovidian Eve
1. Eve (Biblical figure) – In literature 2. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D. Metamorphoses
3. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost
i. title
821.4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, Mandy.
Milton’s ovidian Eve / by Mandy Green.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6666-0 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7546-9348-2 (ebook)
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost. 2. Eve (Biblical figure)—In literature.
3. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D. Metamorphoses. 4. Ovid, 43 B.C.–17 or 18 A.D.—Influence.
i. title.
PR3562.G74 2009
821’.4—dc22
2008055034
ISBN 9780754666660 (hbk)
ISBN 9780754693482 (ebk.V)
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgements xii
List of Abbreviations xiii
introduction 1
1 “The Fairer Image”: Reflections of Narcissus and Pygmalion’s
Ivory Maid 23
2 Daphne and the Issue of Consent 53
3 Maiden, Bride and Mother: Three Faces of Eve 77
4 “Goddess Humane”: Eve as venus, Queen of the Graces 99
5 “the vine and Her Elm”: A Marriage Made in Paradise 123
6 “Access Deni’d”: The Virgin in the Garden 149
7 “softening the stony”: Eve and the Process of spiritual
regeneration 181
afterword 209
Works Cited 213
Index 229
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Foreword
Given his array of disguises and final enforced transformation into a serpent,
satan would evidently seem the most obviously ovidian character in Paradise
Lost, yet it is Eve who is more vitally quickened to life through a succession of
metamorphic moments and is arguably the more profoundly ovidian of the two.
These metamorphic moments, when one mythological figuration melts effortlessly
into another, generate an exciting sense of dynamic provisionality about Eve; they
become a way of enacting or expressing subtly shifting states of mind and feeling,
imparting a sense of psychological depth and authenticity to her responses, which
are always in process, moment by moment, rather than fixed and formulated from
the outset.
the main aim of this study is to reassess the nature of the ovidian presence in
Paradise Lost. i shall demonstrate how Milton appropriates narrative structures,
verbal echoes and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses – not least Ovid’s
own central metaphor of continuous transformation – to create a subtly evolving
portrait of Eve, a multifaceted and intriguing figure of hidden depths. The book
proceeds by a series of unfolding explorations of Eve, examining her alignment
with a range of mythological figures from a number of different vantage points.
a study of Paradise Lost’s complex interplay with the Metamorphoses enhances
an appreciation of Milton’s richly textured verse and affects our reading of crucial,
defining moments in the narrative. Strategies of allusion, conflicting perspectives
and emblematic landscapes are all deployed by Milton in a complex, multilayered
creation that challenges preconditioned responses to the poem, which have derived
from easy suppositions about Milton’s attitude to women, pagan mythology and
ovid himself. this study thus stands at the intersection of a number of seventeenth-
century cultural contexts and discourses, most notably, gender relations and
intertextuality, and is frequently in dialogue with the insights and methods of other
critics to clarify the precise nature of my own critical response. (these discussions
are supported by extensive notes, which will enable the reader to pursue these
ongoing critical debates in greater depth.1)
My approach is inevitably indebted to the recent body of work on influence.
richard durocher has helpfully distinguished three general approaches to
influence characterized by the chief metaphor employed in each case: “influence
as anxiety (Bloom); influence as illumination (Wittreich); and influence as
dialogue (Greene)” (30) to which we may add DuRocher’s own preferred image
for “Milton’s relation to Ovid” as “an agon between two poetic champions” (9),
1 there has been a wealth of valuable material published on both Milton and ovid
during the past few decades to which I am indebted; however, only those works cited in this
study can be included in the bibliography.
viii Milton’s Ovidian Eve
though one undertaken in “a spirit of admiring antagonism” (35). In my readings,
where the interplay between Milton’s ovidian legacy and the originality of his
representation of Eve is productive not so much of anxiety and antagonism, but
of acknowledgment and admiration, metamorphosis most adequately describes
the way in which what ovid wrote is imaginatively absorbed by Milton and
transformed into something different, with the new creation nevertheless retaining
some essential quality of the old.2 I would like to argue that in many of these
ovidian moments there is purposeful allusion to a pre-text in the Metamorphoses,
which is actively and deliberately brought into play by Milton. the element of
play in allusion (from the latin alludere, to play with or against) suggests, as
William Porter has perceptively observed, “a more amiable, more polite, more
civilized relationship” than many other models of literary influence that have been
proposed, “a rivalry perhaps, but one that has achieved equilibrium” (32).3
One of the primary purposes of this book is thus to offer a fresh account of
poetic influence: to understand it as the product of creative reading and to regard
the poem as a place where the finest, most alert and nuanced readings take place.
the critical method that issues from such a standpoint is a mode of close reading
that pays careful attention to the unique achievement of ovid and Milton as well
as to the creative interchange between them. By virtue of these close engagements
with key passages from both poets, I aim to make a distinctive contribution to the
understanding of ovid as well as of Milton’s own creatively responsive poetic
imagination. as both poets are highly self-conscious artists who are drawn again
and again to certain thematic preoccupations, I shall be examining significant
examples of intratextuality as well as intertextuality.
Milton’s complex poetic method exacts from the reader a response of openness
and flexibility that allows for a plurality of possibilities at any one time. A literary
study of this kind cannot, of course, enjoy the same flexibility as verse and suffers
the constraints of linear progression. While the argument develops a cumulative
significance, it is not progressive in a linear fashion and does not readily lend
itself to simple prose paraphrase. since it is impossible to adopt a number of
vantage points simultaneously, each chapter will focus on a different aspect of
Eve’s mythological figurations so that we can appreciate her as a figure fully in
the round. such an approach is necessary at the level of the line of verse as well
as in the larger figurations of structure and form. Milton’s richly textured verse is
a medium that can hold in solution a wealth of possibilities; certain key passages
from Paradise Lost must be visited more than once in order to release the full
range of meaning inherent in the lines.
Ovid was to remain a significant imaginative presence informing Milton’s
work from his early Latin elegies to Paradise Lost, the great achievement of his
2 so when daphne is changed to laurel, her shining beauty still remains (Met. I.552).
3 Unfortunately, Porter does not elaborate upon this valuable insight since his
principal concern is to defend Milton’s classical pre-texts, and virgil in particular, against
what he considers to be the “insolence” of Milton’s treatment of them (82).
Foreword ix
poetic maturity. in Elegia prima the youthful poet had represented himself as being
caught between conflicting modes of life: literary pursuits and girl-watching (otia
grata, “the delights of leisure-time,” El. I.18) are suddenly perceived as a tempting
distraction from the rigours of his studies at Cambridge and hastily abandoned.
in Tetrachordon the mature Milton had a different view: he now recognized such
relaxation to be not only harmless, but essential to the husbanding of intellectual
energies, for him as for all serious-minded individuals:
no mortall nature can endure either in the actions of religion, or study of
wisdome, without somtime slackning the cords of intense thought and labour ...
We cannot therefore alwayes be contemplative, or pragmaticall abroad, but have
need of som delightfull intermissions, wherin the enlarg’d soul may leav off a
while her severe schooling; and like a glad youth in wandring vacancy, may keep
her hollidaies to joy and harmles pastime. (Col. 4.85–6)4
Just as in an Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton had remembered the pleasure of
reading ovid’s elegiac poetry as being his favourite pastime years before, when
“no recreation came to me better welcome” (Col. 3.i.302), now the soft ease of
female companionship5 is likened to a schoolboy’s holiday from his “severe
schooling.”6 While Milton would have judged the stylistic brilliance of the text
of the Metamorphoses to be, like Eve herself, “in outward shew / Elaborate, of
inward less exact” (VIII.538–9),7 such literary otium was nevertheless a necessary
refreshment for him, like the otium of marriage.
4 All quotations from Milton’s prose works are taken from the Columbia edition
edited by F. A. Patterson. Like so many students of Milton, I remain indebted to the
richly informative notes of alaistair Fowler’s edition of Paradise Lost, particularly those
of the first edition. All quotations from Milton’s poetical works are, however, taken from
The Riverside Milton edited by roy Flannagan. i have preferred this edition because the
unmodernized spelling of the 1674 text of Paradise Lost releases the etymological force
of many verbal puns that would otherwise go unnoticed (after death’s sexual assault, for
example, Sin is left “dismaid,” II.792), and discloses the substantial quality of concepts like
Beauty and Grace more than a modern edition with lighter capitalization would do.
5 Although Milton famously identified himself with the fate of Orpheus, his song
unheeded by a hostile audience (VII.32–8), he was not in sympathy with the latter’s
avoidance of the female sex, which, according to George Sandys’ sanitized account, was
owing to their being “a hinderance to the study of philosophy, & administration of civill
affairs” (519). (For a more detailed account of Sandys’ comprehensive commentary on the
Metamorphoses, see 7–8.)
6 Otia grata is no longer simply contrasted with durus labor (“hard work”); they are
both perceived as complementary phases of the same creative rhythm.
7 Looking forward to Samson Agonistes, Milton’s position had hardened, and the
female sex is decried as a beautiful decorative surface that lacks depth: so much attention
had been lavished on “such outward ornament” that “inward gifts / Were left for hast
unfinish’t” (1025, 1026–7).