Paradise Lost: "Danger in Good Sex"

Jan Brueghel the Younger

Paradise (c. 1620)

"Behold that great, astonished prude,

the lion proud with little pride..."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Despite being a 'Puritan', Milton was hardly what one might call 'puritanical' -- although he did praise above "all Temples th' upright heart and pure" (PL 1.18) -- and I promised yesterday some evidence today on how explicit and titillating Milton can get.

I had broken off yesterday's entry almost immediately after noting James Grantham Turner's remark about Milton despising the "open flaunting of illicit sexuality" (Turner 153), so one might imagine Milton as one of those puritanical prigs who patch over every explicit thing with fig leaves. Milton does not describe everything in explicit detail, of course, for he's better than that. What he does is cover just enough to let the sensuous rhythms of his words and the amorous workings of our own imaginations do the rest:

Milton is no prude, and he expresses Adam and Eve's sexual intercourse and climax in a veiled manner that intimately yet unexpectedly involves the reader in their private erotic play, which implies Eve's:

Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (PL 4.308-11)

That "sweet reluctant amorous delay" takes us to the very brink of their climax, which is then again delayed for us as Milton conceals from us those "mysterious parts" (4.312) that were only for Adam and Eve unconcealed.

Yet, paradise does pose its challenges to the happy couple in their "mutable perfection" (PL 5.524), for:

Hidden from that first pair was the fact that Eve's game of amorous delay, both prior to and during lovemaking, left Adam vulnerable to an unfortunate consequence:

Because sweet reluctant amorous delay will provide a daily reaffirmation of "the conscience of her worth," Adam will inevitably be vulnerable to the opposite of object-debasement. The game that preserves Eve's value from the fate of debasement works all too well, and the consequence is a tendency in the first husband to abase himself before the idol of his mate. It is no surprise when he falls "Fondly overcome with female charm" (9.999). The sexual fantasy Milton embedded at the origins of human love simply has to, by its very meaning, buck against the ordained hierarchy that sets the man over the woman. It makes the Fall explicable. (Kerrigan and Braden 45)

As Kerrigan and Braden go on to note, "Courtly love was charged early on with idolatry, and Adam's Fall is in this sense a medieval one," in the sense that Milton places himself, if ironically, within the Medieval Romance tradition (William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden. "Milton's Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry," English Literary History. Volume 53, Number 1 (Spring, 1986), page 48).

On the other hand, my faithful commentor who goes by the pen name "Eshuneutics" has pointed out Milton's more positive debt to the tradition of courtly love, so I will need to work a bit more nuance into this paper.

And some say that blogging is a distraction from serious scholarly work! Not that my own work is very serious...