In the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, many principles of feminist criticism can be applied to the text. The character of eve is depicted as unequal to her counterpart, Adam, and is placed into a powerless position that she can only break free from by breaking the one rule of Eden-eating from the forbidden fruit or “fruit of knowledge”. It is interesting to see how Milton plays around with gender structures within the text because he sets it up as a typical patriarchal structure but then seemingly breaks it down using a variety of methods. I would also argue that Milton identifies with Eve more than any other character in the text, the only exception being Satan.
In Paradise Lost, in every domain where patriarchy reigns (which is pretty much everywhere), woman is other, and is objectified, marginalized, and defined at times only by difference from male norms. This is true of Eve, as she is unable to sit in on Adam’s conversations with Michael because she is seen as inferior or not as smart as him. When reading this text, it is also apparent that gender issues play a part in every aspect of Adam and Eve’s human experience. Adam and Eve’s relationship is conflicting, because Adam views Eve as his beautiful counterpart, but to the point at times that he may look at her as an object rather than her own person. Eve is aware that she is viewed as an other and takes all of her oppression into account when she decides to eat the forbidden fruit.

The hierarchy between Eve and Adam and Adam and God is first established in Book IV when we see Eve awake after being created. When Eve explains to Adam her first memories of waking up, she tells him “My other half: with that thy gentle hand/Seiz’d mine, I yielded, and from that time see/How beauty is excelled by manly grace” (Milton, 4.487-489). Eve yields to Adam as her authority figure firstly because she was created out of him and that he was created by God, but then also submits to his power since she does not have direct access to God and he does. This hierarchy is essential to Eve’s decision to eat the forbidden fruit because much of her reasoning has to do with her feeling inferior and being at the bottom of her hierarchy. She must obtain her information about anything from Adam, who obtains his information from the angel Raphael, who in turn obtains his information from God. Eve’s access to information is limited, and she is very much trapped in her lowly position. The forbidden fruit poses as her one way to gain more power and rise out of this state. Rather than the person that doomed mankind to sin, Milton instead paints Eve as a hero in a way through her decision to eat the forbidden fruit and one can view the action as her breaking out of her gender hierarchy that she is a part of.

The imagery of darkness and shade in Eve’s story works as a connection to Milton’s blindness. This is one of the ways that Milton identifies himself with Eve as opposed to other characters such as Adam. We also find out in Book XII that Eve gains the same information that Adam received from Michael, but through God in her dreams. This is a clear parallel to Milton who notes in Book XII “in darkness, and with dangers compast round,/and solitude; yet not alone, while thou/visit’st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn/purples the East: still govern thou my Song” (Milton, 7.26-29). In this way Milton is purposefully attributing his own qualities to Eve, thus making her one the most important figures in driving Milton’s argument.

Sources cited:

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2003, pp. 173–469.

Throughout the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, there are many instances in which the reader is presented with complex ideas that are soon after refuted, causing a joint empowerment and humiliation of the reader. It seems as though the text is written specifically to influence the reader to Milton’s opinions on power and free thinking while simultaneously giving readers the power to make their own conclusions about what Milton is presenting to them. I plan to argue in my seminar project that Milton’s awareness and intentional engagement with his reader throughout Paradise Lost adds to the effectiveness and success of the text. The reception of this epic poem in 18th century colonial America is of particular importance due to the significant influence of Puritan and republican themes portrayed in Paradise Lost on the foundation of America’s government and culture.
This seminar project will work in conjunction with my thesis to help analyze secondary sources and incorporate different literary criticisms into my paper. I want to incorporate reader-response criticism specifically into the project because I feel that my argument can be best supplemented using this criticism and I believe that it will help in the development of my SCE paper as well. Creating a connection between Paradise Lost and particular influences on the American Revolution using reader-response criticism will allow for a greater understanding of Milton’s political undertones in his writing and the subsequent possibility of influence from Paradise Lost into aspects of the American Revolution. Focusing in on the rhetoric of colonial America such as pamphlets and persuasive texts such as Common Sense by Thomas Paine and seeing the impact of Milton in those texts will help me to see more directly how large of an impact Milton’s ideas had on the American revolution.
Evidence will be drawn from Paradise Lost itself, as well as secondary sources that focus on the reader-response and interaction between Milton and his readers in Paradise Lost. Some key words I would like to incorporate into this project are reader experience, intention, affective stylistics, and resymbolization. By assessing the relationship between Milton and his readers in Paradise Lost, I can gain a better understanding of the text itself and how it could have influenced other writers and events. I will be further analyzing Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic by Lydia Schulman as part of my seminar project.
Works Cited:
Fish, Stanley. “Surprised by Sin” – Stanley Fish | Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Schulman, Lydia D. Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic. Northeastern Univ. Press, 1992.

While new historicism lacks a specific or clearer methodology than other criticisms, its most beneficial aspects lie in its progressive outlook and openness to subjective analyses of historical events and texts. Unlike old historicism, new historicism recognizes the fact that a historical analysis can never be truly objective because each person brings their own influences with them when viewing a particular event of text in time. This has allowed for new analysis on old literature or events that were deemed to be objectively and fully analyzed before a new critic was able to think about it differently using new historicism. Possibly one of its greatest contributions to the literary community is the fact that it allowed for critics to rethink and look at an old historical event or text in a different way when its meaning was at one time thought to be set in stone.
As shown through professor Rydel’s essay on sexual violence in medieval narrative, there are many different ways to view a narrative and provide your own perspective on a topic. Professor Rydel was able to shine some light on the fact that there were actually some male writers who gave voice to women through their narrative such as Gilte did with his legend about Winifred. She uses a feminist lens to analyze the Golden Legend story, noting that “Winifred’s quick thinking, determination to escape, and desire to live result in a permutation of the genre that would have been highly visible within the context of the collection” (Rydel). This view that the depiction of Winifred’s story and a community coming together to give voice to her allowed for the transformation of a genre was qualified through a new historicism way of thinking as opposed to traditional historians who would’ve only been concerned about what happened and what that tells us about the history of the story.
I may consider incorporating new historicism into my own analysis of Paradise Lost and how it could have affected colonial America in terms of the anti-establishment rhetoric that was popular in 18th century America during its separation from England. While my Junior seminar project will be more specifically focusing in on reader-response criticism to Paradise Lost, I can incorporate larger ideas from new historicism such as personal identity being shaped by the culture in which it emerges to help explain Milton’s narrative decisions and literary techniques.

Rydel, Courtney. “Lengendary Resistance: Critiquing Rape Culture in Virgin Martyr Passions.”

Throughout the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, there are many instances in which the reader is presented with complex ideas that are soon after refuted, causing a joint empowerment and humiliation of the reader. It seems as though the text is written specifically to influence the reader to Milton’s opinions on power and free thinking while simultaneously giving readers the power to make their own conclusions about what Milton is presenting to them. I plan to argue in my seminar project that Milton’s awareness and intentional engagement with his reader throughout Paradise Lost adds to the effectiveness and success of the text. I want to incorporate reader-response criticism specifically into the project because I feel that my argument can be best supplemented using this criticism and I believe that it will help in the development of my SCE paper as well. Creating a connection between Paradise Lost and particular influences on the American Revolution using reader-response criticism will allow for a greater understanding of Milton’s political undertones in his writing and the subsequent possibility of influence from Paradise Lost into aspects of the American Revolution. Evidence will be drawn from Paradise Lost itself, as well as secondary sources that focus on the reader-response and interaction between Milton and his readers in Paradise Lost. Some key words I would like to incorporate into this project are reader experience, intention, affective stylistics, and resymbolization. By assessing the relationship between Milton an his readers in Paradise Lost, I can gain a better understanding of the text itself and how it could have influenced other writers and events.

Works Cited:
Fish, Stanley. “Surprised by Sin” – Stanley Fish | Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Schulman, Lydia D. Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic. Northeastern Univ. Press, 1992.

In examining Stanley Fish’s article, “Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost,” our class discussed the different ways in which writers interact with their readers and attempt to incite a particular reader-response from them. Of course, each reader has their own unique reading experience, and each reader brings with them their own individual intentions and beliefs, so the reader-response will be different for every reader in some facet. The same reader usually even has a significantly different reader-response when analyzing the same text for a second time. There are still however, main points and ideas that are driven home by the writer that in some way or another will be analyzed similarly by multiple readers. In Paradise Lost, Fish argues that John Milton is attempting to both educate and humiliate his readers through subverting the reader’s expectations and questioning his own stances.
Fish claims that “Milton consciously wants to worry his reader, to force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence in his own perception is its focus” (Fish, 4). I believe in Milton’s strategy of filling his readers with doubt that he is teaching them the importance of questioning themselves as well as authority. In this case, Milton is the authority as the writer of Paradise Lost, and guides the reader in their thinking but knows that while he can present his own ideas, they can be interpreted in a multitude of ways by different readers.
From Fish’s perspective, Milton seems to be very consciously aware of his readers throughout Paradise Lost. Fish uses Milton’s harassment of his reader as an example of his interaction with the reader. The reader is set up to believe one thing and then becomes disappointed with the shock that their expectation was subverted. An example of this is the character of Satan, who readers first assume to be purely evil but then are intrigued by his human-like interior struggles. Even though Satan is the villain of the story, he is immediately shown as an underdog with outstanding qualities of leadership and resilience. By unsettling his readers through his break of traditional epic molds and making his opinions ambiguous, Milton gives power to the reader to interpret the text the way they want to.
The center of Paradise Lost’s subject is in fact the reader, because as Milton states at the beginning of the epic, he hopes to “justify the ways of God to men” (Milton). Milton uses Paradise Lost as a creative way to open readers’ minds up to questioning authority and seeing things through different lenses. In my opinion, at least some form of reader-response criticism would need to be used to have an accurate analysis of Paradise Lost since Milton is so in tune with the importance of his text as an event that occurs within the reader rather than an object.

Works Cited:
“Surprised by Sin – Stanley Fish.” – Stanley Fish | Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, 2008.