Lovemaking in Milton's Paradise

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Paradise Lost, Milton took the unusual stand of asserting that Adam and Eve engaged in sexual relations while still in Eden before the Fall, a stand which was, if not totally original with Milton, at least a departure from almost all treatments of his scriptural material by Christian poets, theologians, and biblical commentators before him. Any importance that the relative distinctiveness of such a stand implies is reinforced further by the enthusiastic outbursts of the poem's usually calm narrator when he touches on the subject of our first parents' nocturnal lovemaking (in Book IV) and on the related subject of the naked Eve's physical attractiveness. What amounts to an instance of Milton's personal emphasis in the poem, then, encourages the reader as well as Adam to view sexual love as the “sum” of prelapsarian bliss (VIII, 522); and when love of Eve proves to be the cause of Adam's fall, we are prompted to appreciate his decision as complex and difficult, even while we judge him mistaken in placing his love of Eve before obedience to God. The difficulty that Milton's own insistence upon prelapsarian sexual love works into Adam's decision is typical of the poet's presentation of prelapsarian life generally. Life in Milton's relatively difficult Eden is not so much significantly different from our postlapsarian existence as it is a pastoral image of our present complex life in small.