XVII. Unfallen Sexuality
But doute, induryng that plesour
Thay luffit uther paramour,
No marvell bene thoucht swa suld be,
Consyderyng thare gret bewte.
SIR DAVID LYNDSAY: Ane Dialog.
Milton and St. Augustine agree in contrasting the fallen sexuality which we now know, and which is conditioned by the disobedience of our members, with an unfallen sexuality. But for St. Augustine the unfallen sexuality is purely hypothetical: when he describes it he is describing what the act of generation would have been before the Fall, but he does not think it ever took place. Milton asserts that it did.
This difference is not very important, since there is, for St. Augustine, no reason why it should not have occurred. What is much more to the purpose is the saint’s comment on his own discussion of the question. ‘We are speaking of something which is now a matter of shame; and therefore, though we conjecture as best we can what it would have been like before it became shameful, it is very necessary that our discourse be rather reined in by modesty than assisted by eloquence. I speak of a thing which they two who alone could have experienced it never did experience: how then when mention is made of it now can it be presented to human fantasy except in the likeness of the turbid lust we have tried and not of the tranquil volition we conjecture?’ (De Civit. XIV, 26). This was a warning to Milton that it is dangerous to attempt a poetical representation of something which is unimaginable, not in the sense of raising no images, but in the more disastrous sense of inevitably raising the wrong ones. This warning he defied. He has dared to represent Paradisal sexuality. I cannot make up my mind whether he was wise.
The difficulty is raised in its acutest form when Milton’s Eve exhibits sexual modesty. Her impulse on first meeting Adam is to turn back (P.L. VIII, 507); she is led to the bridal bower ‘blushing like the morn’ (ibid. 511); she yields to her lover’s embraces with ‘sweet, reluctant, amorous delay’ (IV, 311). Now Milton is here in a cleft stick. To readers since the Fall such scenes will hardly be pleasing if Eve is represented as having no modesty at all; on the other hand, shame of the body and the body’s operations is consequent upon sin and had no place in the time of innocence. The defence of Milton’s treatment must consist in distinguishing bodily shame as we now know it from some kind of bashfulness or modesty which can be conceived as existing before the Fall. Coleridge goes very far in this direction when he writes: ‘There is a state of manners conceivable so pure that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia’s feet might be a harmless rallying or playful teazing of a shame that would exist in Paradise’ (Lectures and Notes of 1818. Section VII: on Beaumont and Fletcher).
It appears to me that we can, in fact, make some such distinction. People blush at praise—not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs. Most people exhibit some kind of modesty or bashfulness, at least at the beginning, in receiving any direct statement of another human being’s affection for them, even if that affection is quite unrelated to sex or to the body at all. To be valued is an experience which involves a curious kind of self-consciousness. The subject is suddenly compelled to remember that it is also an object, and, apparently, an object intently regarded: hence, in a well-ordered mind, feelings of unworthiness and anxiety, mingled with delight, spring up. There seems to be a spiritual, as well as a physical, nakedness, fearful of being found ugly, embarrassed even at being found lovely, reluctant (even when not amorously reluctant) to be found at all. If this is what we mean by shame we may, perhaps, conclude that there was shame in Paradise. We may, I think, go further and suppose that even without the Fall sexual love would have excited this kind of shame in a specially strong degree; for in sexual love the subject is most completely forced to realize that it is an object. But that is quite the furthest we can go. All that part of shame which is specially connected with the body, which depends on an idea of indecency, must be completely ruled out. And I do not think it can be ruled out while we are reading Milton. His Eve exhibits modesty too exclusively in sexual contexts, and his Adam does not exhibit it at all. There is even a strong and (in the circumstances) a most offensive suggestion of female bodily shame as an incentive to male desire. I do not mean that Milton’s love-passages are objectionable by normal human standards; but they are not consistent with what he himself believes about the world before the Fall.
Perhaps this was inevitable, but if so, the poet should not have touched the theme at all. I can conceive of a successful treatment. I believe that if Dante had chosen to paint such a thing, he might have succeeded—might have convinced us that our first parents were not living in virginity and yet prevented the false associations which Milton arouses. It is conceivable that Milton himself might have succeeded if he had said nothing about angelic love and treated the loves of Adam and Eve as remotely and mysteriously as those of angels. Even a protestation (and who could have written a better one?) that he was now approaching the unimaginable, whatever actual treatment followed that protestation, would have gone far to save him. The trouble is that the poet hardly seems to be aware of the magnitude of his own undertaking. He seems to think that by twice using the word mysterious in this connexion (IV, 743, and VIII, 599) he excuses his very un-mysterious pictures—or to hope that when he writes ‘half her breast Naked met his’ we shall be able, without further assistance, to supply for Adam an experience both very like and totally unlike anything that a fallen man could possibly feel!
Newman complained that Milton treated our first parents with intolerable freedom. This is the opposite of the modern charge that he makes them inhuman. It is the better grounded of the two.