Milton's Eve, the Romance Genre, and Ovid

Abstract

N BOOK VIII of Paradise Lost, Adam suffers a crisis of imagination when he wonders if Nature took perhaps/ More than enough in forming Eve. His anxiety is unwarranted, for the poem abundantly ensures Eve's secondariness to Adam.' Of its strategies, I would like to draw attention to Eve's association with the romance genre and Ovidian poetics-literary forms with a reputation for excessive narrative pleasure, and consequently regarded as secondary to contemplative, educative literary kinds. Eve, like romance and Ovidian textuality, is marked by varietas, wantonness, and motifs of wandering, delay, and suspension. Although these qualities are proleptic of the Fall, Milton does not employ them merely to fix blame on Eve's sex alone. On the contrary, he chooses an Ovidian and romance characterization for Eve primarily to elaborate his ideal of marriage. He adduces the hierarchy of genres both to assert Eve's difference from the epic Adam and to stress that she is a version of him. Eve is, I shall argue, an image or copy of Adam's copious and desirous imagination. The self-reflexive relationship between Adam's copia and his copy in Eve coincides with Milton's conception of the bond between husband and wife, for in Tetrachordon he remarks that woman bears a resembling unlikenes, and most unlike resemblance to man (Works 4:86). In Paradise Lost, Milton notoriously expresses such selfreflexivity by revising Ovid's tale of Narcissus. As I shall maintain in the following pages, this tale, with the companion tales of Pygmalion