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written permission from the JHU Press. In 1808 Hannah More wrote that
according to my notion of household good, which does not include one idea of drudgery or servility, but which involves a large and comprehensive scheme of excellence, I will venture to affirm, that let a woman know what she may, yet if she knows not this, she is ignorant of the most indispensible, the most appropriate branch of female knowledge. 1
Hannah More writes of Eve in terms of wisdom. Eve's wisdom is, to quote, "seen in its effects. Indeed it is felt rather than seen. It is sensibly acknowledged in the peace, the happiness, the virtue of the component parts; in the order, regularity, and beauty of the whole system, of which she is the moving spring" (Wittreich 163-64). 2 The idea of Milton's Eve as the moving spring of the paradisal system comes close to my own reading of her role in the epic. Eve brings about change, and the episode of the meal is a central example in the series of incidents where she is the principal actor.
The critical discussion on the angelic visitation usually privileges Raphael's discourse with Adam. Eve's contribution has been of less interest. 3 How ever, Eve's more immediate means of knowing is achieved through the created things, and the implications of her domestic creativity warrant more extensive comment. The occasion of Raphael's visit is of crucial importance to the investigation of Eve's role in the pursuit of wisdom. I will argue that Eve, through her domestic ability, can be seen to mediate the message Raphael brings from on high.
It is intriguing that the meal, and particularly the details of Eve's practical preparations, should be given such prominence in the text. The meal is attended by three major powers of good, and the occasion it accompanies spans the four central books in the epic. The account of the Creation itself is situated within the framework of Eve's meal. Given that meals are usually mundane events, prompted by the need for survival, and that an elaborate meal takes place in prelapsarian Eden where survival is hardly an immediate problem, this episode is remarkable enough to warrant investigation of more than appearances alone. The meal and its context serve to illustrate some of the precepts of the epic as a whole, such as reciprocity and moderation. It facilitates knowledge of the ways of God, helping Raphael who has been sent for the purpose of making Adam aware of his predicament.
Raphael teaches about the War in Heaven and the Creation, and reinforces the epistemological bounds which are to circumscribe their existence. Complementing this, Eve shows her understanding of the "created things," and her grasp of household manage ment. These are areas of importance which link closely with Raphael's project by putting his teaching into practice, as I aim to show. Albert Fields, and more recently Lorna Hutson, have brought to our attention the Greek teacher Xenophon's influence on early modern literature. Xenophon wrote in the Oeconomicus that "estate management is the name of a branch of knowledge, like medicine, smithing and carpentry . . . the business of a good estate manager is to manage his own estate well (Xenophone 363). 4 Milton's Eve, in contrast to the unfortunate wife of Xenophon's fictional character Isomachus, who relates that "she was vexed and blushed crimson, because she could not give me something from the stores when I asked for it" (Xenophon 429) manages her estate well. Milton's Eve knows about store-keeping.
I will argue that Milton's text re-mythologises the role of the "wife at home." Eve is not only a purveyor of things to eat. Far from perpetuating the convention of Dod and Cleaver's explicit delineation of spheres of responsibility (outdoors for husband, indoors for wife) and the idea that the "woman, as good wife, is merely the example of his [the husband's] ability to govern" (Xenophon 21), Paradise Lost shows a creative autonomy in the actions of Eve that reduces the power of such stereotypes. The text of Paradise Lost moderates the norm advocated in the conduct books, for example as expressed in The Gentlewoman's Companion of 1673.
Far from suggesting that household management [End Page 137] "is a profession that is not difficult; for she that is not capable of any thing else, may be capable of this" (Hobby 185) 5 as that manual asserts, Milton's text reverses that tradition by presenting Eve as highly skilled; she does not need training. Adam has little competence in household management. His ideas on storage are incorrect, whereas Eve shows her expertise. The epic text allows for a reading which refutes the stereotyping, so common in the work of Xenophon and the tradition which derives from him, of woman as inept and herself in need of husbandry.
Eve's actions ground Raphael's instructions, which were to "such discourse bring on, / As may advise him [Adam] of his happy state" (5.233). Eve already understands frugality, temperance, and hospitality; conditions essential to the "happy state." She is, like Adam, highly skilled in husbandry, described by Xenophon as "the mother and nurse of the other arts. For when husbandry flourishes, all the other arts are in good fettle" (Hobby 405). 6 Eve ministers at the table, her ministry in balance with Raphael's to Adam. Both Raphael and Eve are well ordered in the way they proceed, not only obeying the commands they have received from God and Adam respectively (although Eve moderates Adam's instructions), but also in the manner in which they discharge their duties. They are confident and orderly in the performance of their tasks. Raphael, prepared for his task by God, lectures Adam, in a similar orderly manner to the way Eve prepares, orders, and serves the meal. Xenophon would approve: he wrote, "there is nothing so convenient or so good for human beings as order" (429). Eve is, moreover, capable "Of what was high" (8.50), so the argument with which this paper ends, that Eve moves from managing the household to managing the Garden, in possession of new knowledge gleaned from Raphael's plant allegory, seems reasonable.
Furthermore, the meal prepared by Eve for the archangel Raphael provides more than physical sustenance. It becomes the point of departure for Raphael's instruction, which compounds the idea of their purposes being linked. Raphael, in the best pedagogical manner, uses what is to hand as context for his teaching. He takes the idea of food to explain the way towards a higher understanding via transsubstantiation, where all things "corporeal to incorporeal turn./ For know, whatever was created, needs / To be sustained and fed" (5.413).
The theme of "a universal exchange of higher and lower," as Fowler puts it, is expressed at several levels through the interactions between the three characters around the table. At the level of discourse, Raphael and Adam exchange stories, the higher with the lower. Raphael also interacts with Eve, first greeting her as "mother of mankind" (5.388), and then using her contribution as a visible and tactile point of departure for his cosmographical teaching. Eve provides the material starting point for Raphael's discourse, and the "exchange of higher and lower" here is enabled by the sure knowledge that "whatever was created, needs / To be sustained and fed" (5.414), be it an organism or an angelic argument. Transsubstantiation through digestion, physical or intellectual, is central to Raphael's discourse, and Eve's meal provides the basis for this vital process.
The text allows for a reading which elevates Eve's domestic contribution as one method of justifying "the ways of God to men" (1.26). I will refer to commentaries on Proverbs 31, which are concerned with the elevation of domesticity to a form of wisdom. In her assumption of authority in the domestic sphere Eve shows that she is "lowly wise" (8.173). Eve's self-assurance and understanding of temperance and her ordering of the ingredients of the meal show the way in which she, as well as Adam, practices the "contemplation of created things" which leads by steps towards a better understanding of God. Thus Eve enacts Milton's dictum that "doubtlesse that indeed according to art is most eloquent, which returnes and approaches neerest to nature from whence it came; and they expresse nature best, who in their lives least wander from her safe leading, which may be call'd regenerate reason" (CPW 1: 874).
Eating and the pursuit of knowledge are linked activities in the epic, as Christopher Ricks has fa mously pointed out. He writes, "The word (sapere) is important to Milton because it links knowledge and the fruit" ( 71n). The theologian Carol Myers writes of the verb "to eat" as being "[p]erhaps the most prominent theme word in the Eden tale" (89). Myers describes "the human's ability to hear and com prehend God's instructions, and the human's need to know about the sources of sustenance" as [End Page 138] "two features of human life . . . inextricably linked" (90). They are certainly linked activities during the scene in question here, where the most comprehensive sequence of instruction in the epic is juxtaposed with a primordial idyll. Barbara Lewalski writes of georgic rather than pastoral activity here; "Milton's Edenic pastoral undergoes continuing redefinition . . . . Husbandry, though unlaborious, is necessary to the maintenance of the Garden" (174). For Raphael's visit Eve redefines the pastoral meal described in Book 4, when she and Adam simply enjoyed what was to hand, unprocessed: "The savoury pulp they chew, and in the rind / Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream" (4.335). Here, in the more festive scene, Eve sorts, orders, and arranges the food, and makes delicious grape juice and tempered "dulcet creams" (5.347). Her "husbandry," the careful processing of the food and drink, is a new development.
The idea of transubstantiation, explained at length by Raphael, illustrates the inextricability of the link between the material and the immaterial. Angels eat and digest food in a similar way to Adam and Eve, they "Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate, / And cor poreal to incorporeal turn" (5.412). As far as knowledge is concerned "Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed / To vital spirits aspire, to animal, / To intellectual, give both life and sense" (5. 483). The continuum between the material and the immaterial, food and knowledge, is explained carefully by Raphael. For us, Milton provides food for thought, and this is made possible by Eve as she conveys Raphael's message into the practical sphere. She makes sense of it, and the text privileges her contribution as it does that of Raphael.
Evidence in support of the idea of a link between Raphael and Eve is found in other ways too. From the moment of Raphael's arrival in Eden the text emphasizes a reciprocity of perfumed essences that proclaims their parallel functions. Eve is consistently associated with flowers, and she "strews the ground" around the table "With rose and odours from the shrub unfumed." (5.348). The immaterial exchange of perfumes prefigures the material exchange of food for knowledge which is to follow. Raphael is draped elegantly in his three pairs of wings as he lands, and walks towards the bower, wafting perfume and regal composure as he "shook his plumes, that heavenly fragrance filled / The circuit wide" (5.285). The clouds of fragrance which accompany him are met by the aromatic fragrances of the Garden, the "groves of myrrh, / And flowering odours, cassia, nard, and balm" (5.292). Thus heavenly essences combine with earthly essences, just as knowledge of God gives rise to earthly response and obedience, for example in the form of the songs of praise sung in unison by Adam and Eve. Diane McColley sees this reciprocity in the passage describing Adam's account of his wedding night, when he says that "Heaven and earth . . . join to approve" (8.513) God's approval shown then by the mixing of perfumes. I would suggest that the same approval joins heaven to earth at the scene of Raphael's arrival. God has, after all, sanctioned the visit of his "sociable spirit." The perfumed air wafts divine approval, in just such a way as the "ambrosial fragrance" which permeates heaven accompanies God's speech and enables a "Sense of new joy ineffable" in 3.135-37.
The philosopher Pierre Charron, a representative voice of Renaissance humanist wisdom, describes the sense of smell as one "fitted to those Spirits and Avenues that belong to the Soul and Body both." 7 Raphael is about to embark on a discourse on both soul and body, and it is therefore appropriate that his visit is introduced by the exchange of perfumes, signifying the interdependency, and indeed the relatedness of the material with the immaterial. 8 The scented air, thus sanctioned, provides the perfect ambience for Adam and Eve's reception of new ideas. Additionally, Raphael receives the scents of Eden, which provide a means for him to learn. Both the soul and body are engaged in reciprocal harmonious learning.
Adam spots the approaching archangel as he sits in his doorway waiting for Eve to prepare the noontime meal. This division of labor, a possible intrusion of stereotyped notions of gendered behavior, or seventeenth-century etiquette, is shown in another light when read against Proverbs, where the woman, procuring and preparing food for her family, fulfills a function essential to life in protecting, preserving, and securing the economic base. Carol Myers writes about "the industrious woman" in Proverbs 31, "whose strength is portrayed mainly in terms of her [End Page 139] economic functions" (179-80). Claudia Camp adds that in Proverbs, "The movement is to put Wisdom firmly on the everyday level; although that human level, represented in female imagery, is a highly idealized one, in part because of the woman of worth's canonical association with personified Wisdom" (97). The text of Paradise Lost can thus be seen to prefigure the trend found in the twentieth century by Myers and Camp in Proverbs, since it elevates rather than demeans woman's domesticity.
This comes to the fore in the way in which Eve comprehends the nature of the job at hand. The intake of food, just as the permitted intake of knowledge, must be regulated, and not overindulged. Robert Cleaver, in his 1614 commentary on Proverbs writes that "By foode, he meaneth all such things as are needfull for the use of mans life; and by Much, he understandeth a fit and competent measure" (68). 9 Milton's Eve knows precisely how to gather food, how much to prepare ("a fit and competent measure"), and the proper ceremony to be attached to its presentation. She says that she "Each plant and juiciest gourd will pluck such choice / To entertain our angel guest" (5.327). Eve shows her ability to select not only which fruits to use, but also she exercises choice, or right reason, in her selections and arrangements. Eve not only chooses to entertain the guest, but she also presents him with a select choice of the choicest fruits. In this way Eve shows that she is aware of her role as Adam's helper and her association with the natural world, which indicates her "regenerate reason." Eve will preside over the meal for Raphael, naturally assuming authority. 10
Adam, in contrast to Eve's composure, is taken aback by the approaching angel. He is unwise in suggesting that Eve should "go with speed, / And what your stores contain, bring forth" (5.313). Eve knows that in Eden both speed and stores are generally unnecessary. She says that "small store will serve, where store, / All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk" (5.322). Only a few fruits improve with storage, the ones that taste better when dried. Eve explains to Adam that an abundance of food is available for use as it is, "Save what by frugal storing firmness gains / To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes" (5.324). Thus Eve shows consciousness of the problem of superfluity, or excess; particularly in her correction of Adam's excessive ideas of hospitality, but also in her unwillingness to serve fruit which is excessively watery. Her understanding of temperance anticipates Raphael's in her tempering of the dessert as in "From many a berry, and from sweet kernels pressed / She tempers dulcet creams" (5.346). Eve is careful, frugal, and temperate--she introduces the notion of frugality to the epic. As John Guillory has argued, the rhetoric of frugality is central to the text: all the characters and thematic events touch upon it (80). But it is Eve, not Adam, who introduces the concept. Eve's primary role in the exercise of frugality is of central importance; she even engages in an exchange with an angel in performance of this exercise.
Thus Eve supplies a degree of wisdom about "created things" to this prelapsarian classroom. She chooses "What order so contrived as not to mix / Tastes, not well joined, inelegant, but bring / Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change" (8.334; my emphasis). Eve brings Raphael's cosmological teachings down to earth most aptly, and through her consonance with nature and sense of order, she has access to a major source of wisdom. Charron writes that "there are three sorts of Wisdom, Divine, Hu mane, and Worldly; these relate and bear proportion to God; to Nature in its primitive Purity and Perfection; and to Nature lapsed and depraved" (Charron, Author's Preface). Knowledge of the latter is not yet applicable, but Eve's confidence in this scene shows her knowledge of "Nature in its primi tive Purity and Perfection," which indicates her state of wisdom.
The pattern of Eve's reaction to Adam follows Raphael's closely. Irene Samuel notes how Raphael tends to reprove Adam before accommodating his wishes. Eve acts as Raphael does in this respect. First, she corrects Adam's ideas on food preparation, and then she accommodates his main wish, which is that they should be hospitable (Samuel 708, 710). 11 This similarity of approach sustains the link between Eve and Raphael. Yet all three learn during this episode. Eve functions through her direct interaction with all her surroundings; she does not confine her attention to matters relating to Adam only as one is led to expect by the line "He for God only, she for God in him" (4.299). Christine Froula notices "Eve's desire [End Page 140] for experienced rather than mediated knowledge," and the problems this poses to the epic authorities (329). Eve, in contrast to Raphael, fulfills her task intuitively, working under no other guidance but her own. So the reciprocity of learning activities at the dinner-party scene is not consistent with a straight line of wisdom and authority passed down from God to Adam and so to Eve. Eve is not merely a passive recipient of the crumbs from Adam's table; she has made the cake, and Adam is not too sure of her ingredients.
Eve modifies and moderates Adam's ideas. She sees to it that Raphael will perceive that "here on earth / God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven" (5.329). In creating the meal, Eve acts directly upon the raw materials. She first exercises choice and order (5.333,334), the most privileged terms, and then "gathers," "heaps," "crushes," "presses," and "tem pers"--all active verbs signifying active skills which bring about change. Eve interprets the bounties of nature, arranges the "created things," creating out of the Creation. Raphael carries the notion of change, demonstrated by Eve, into his explanation of transsubstantiation. Even angels eat, and "corporeal to incorporeal turn" (5.413). Eve's meal complements, illustrates, and inspires the discourse sanctioned by the Creator via his archangel. It inspires Raphael's explanation and performs a conciliatory and mediating function between heaven and earth.
If the approach of Raphael heralds the opening of the scene, the departure of Eve signifies its disruption. There is a dynamic counterpoise here, the movement towards the table balanced by the movement away from it. Eve, with her affiliation to nature, is especially receptive to Raphael's plant metaphor. From the idea of the root to the "flowers and their fruit / Man's nourishment" (5.482), an issue close to her heart, Eve learns the significance of the process from the material to the immaterial. Plants, food, and wisdom become officially interrelated by Raphael's authorization, and gardening takes on a new dimension. From one level of competence, the domestic, Eve's pursuit of wisdom continues in another form as she departs to resume her gardening with new intensity. Eve becomes a terraculturalist.
University of Oslo
1. "Hannah More's Coelebs on Milton's Eve" (quoted in Wittreich 163). More discusses Milton's Eve in the introductory pages of her book Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808).
2. More's book only mentions Eve in the introductory passages.
3. See, for example, Burden, who does not write about the meal in The Logical Epic. Bradford writes, "Eve moves into the background during this period of instruction" and "for most of the central section of the poem she exists in the margins" (37-38). McColley mentions the meal insofar as it represents an example of Eve's creativity, without connecting it with the idea of wisdom. The meal is a "gracious errand" (114). Turner writes of Adam's "more dominant posture, sitting at the door of his bower . . . while Eve hangs back like a servant" (285).
4. According to the translator, the influence of this book extended from Virgil to Ruskin. Lorna Hutson explains the influence of Xenophon on sixteenth-century culture: "Xenophon turns up everywhere" (29). Milton regarded Xenophon as equal to Plato. See his An Apology against a Pamphlet, ed. Frederick Lovett Taft, in CPW 1: 891. The surprising equality suggested by Milton is explained by Lawrence A. Sasek: Milton "was judging them according to their efficacy in teaching men to live virtuously . . . . Xenophon is the equal of Plato as teacher, not as literary craftsman or philosopher . . . . Milton's familiarity with the whole canon of Xenophon can be assumed from his citation of the relatively obscure Hiero" (260-61). For a similar argu ment, see Anthony Low, "'Plato and his equal Xeno phon': A Note on Milton's Apology for Smectym nuus," Milton Quarterly 4 (1970): 20-22.
5. Hobby has found that the Gentlewoman's Com panion does not come from the pen of the early feminist Hannah Wolley as purported. It is "part of a thriving seventeenth-century tradition of male assertions about what could be achieved by women if they were properly trained" (186-97). She places the manual amongst the "hack writing in this period before the invention of authorial copyright" (190).
6. Xenophon's heroine is taught how to order her household by her husband. In Milton's description of Edenic domesticity, the opposite appears to be the case.
7. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, Three Books, trans. Samson Lennard, London; Printed for Nathaniel Renew and Ionathan Robinson at the King's Arms in St. Paul's Churchyard. 1670, p. 84.
8. Milton expresses his monist materialism thus, "spirit, being the more excellent substance . . . contains within itself what is clearly the inferior substance; in the same way as the spiritual and rational faculty contains the corporeal" (The Christian Doctrine CPW. 6: 309).
9. Hutson shows the provenance of the notion of the virtuous wife at home as "the example of his [the husband's] ability to govern," to be Xenophon, in her account of the critical tradition descending from Dod and Cleaver's Godlie Forme of Household Government (1612), 21.
10. Even C. S. Lewis remarks on her composure, writing that "[s]he stands before him unabashed--a great lady doing the honours of her own house, the matriarch of the world" (116).
11. "Raphael disparages Adam's enquiries about as tronomy, but answers them, and then comments, "Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid" (8.167). Raphael, though with misgiving, spends some time answering the question before he speaks his mild rebuke and counsel" (Samuel 708, 710).
Bradford, Richard, ed. Paradise Lost. Buckingham: Oxford UP, 1992.
Burden, Dennis H. The Logical Epic: A Study of the Argument of Paradise Lost. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Camp, Claudia, Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs. Sheffield, Eng.: Almond, 1985.
Charron, Pierre, Of Wisdom. Trans. Samson Lennard. London, 1670.
Cleaver, Robert. A Plaine and Familiar Exposition of the First and Second Chapters of the Proverbs of Solomon. London: Printed by T.S. for Thomas Man, 1614.
CPW. See Milton.
Fields, Albert. "Milton and Self-Knowledge." PMLA 83 (1968): 392-99.
Froula, Christine. "When Eve Reads Milton: Un doing the Canonical Economy." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321-47.
Guillory, John, "From the Superfluous to the Supernumary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost." Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1990. 68-88.
Hobby, Elaine. "'A Woman's best setting out is silence':The Writings of Hannah Wolley." Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 179-200.
Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1994.
Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985.
Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford UP, 1942.
Low, Anthony. "'Plato, and His Equall Xenophon': A Note on Milton's Apology For Smectymnuus." Milton Quarterly 4 (1970): 20-22.
McColley, Diane Kelsey. Milton's Eve. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1983.
Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 8 vols. in 10. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1953-82. Referred to in the text as CPW.
More, Hannah. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. 1808. London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1830.
Myers, Carol. Discovering Eden: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Myers, William. "The Spirit of Différence." John Milton. Ed. Annabel Patterson. London: Longman, 1992. 102-19.
Ricks, Christopher. Milton's Grand Style. Oxford: Clarendon, 1963.
Samuel, Irene. "Milton on Learning and Wisdom." PMLA 64 (1949): 708-23.
Sasek, Lawrence A. "Plato, and His Equall, Xenophon." English Language Notes 7 (1970): 260-61.
Turner, James Grantham. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.
Wittreich, Joseph. Feminist Milton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987.
Xenophon. The Oeconomicus. Trans. E.C. Marchant. London: Heinemann, 1953.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v032/32.4gulden.html