Paradise Lostand the Politics of “Begetting”

Abstract

Paradise Lost's horrific depiction of Sin caught in a cycle of incest, rape, and violent reproduction has long been a site of critical fascination. In order to understand the full significance of Sin, however, she needs to be considered in relation to the second incestuous daughter John Milton represents in his poem. Scholars have noted that both Adam and Satan conceive, give birth to, and then proceed to have sex with their daughters, casting Sin and Eve as incestuous daughter-mother figures. Rather than equating the two figures, however, these structural parallels serve to frame a series of crucial distinctions between them. Though critics have moved beyond interpreting these births as merely fallen and unfallen versions of sexuality and reproduction, the status of these scenes as part of Milton's engagement with the seventeenth-century politics of family has yet to be recognized. 1 Acknowledging the ways in which the poem depicts the relations of Adam and Eve to echo the relations of Satan and Sin will illuminate the stakes of its ultimate denial of their incestuous nature.Defending the execution of Charles I in Eikonoklastes, Milton used the language of incest as a way to attack royalist ideology. Milton's political mobilization of the language of family held particular resonance as his opponents drew on the power of the patriarchal analogy to add accusations of parricide to charges of regicide. Explicitly rejecting the term parricide, Milton mounted a broader critique of patriarchalism, arguing that "A father and a king are very different things" (A Defence 68).Though Milton decried the conflation of family and state as a problem of monarchy, Richard Cromwell's ascent to the office of Protector upon the death of his father in 1658 demonstrated that hereditary rule still held great appeal, even during the Interregnum. After Richard's government failed, Milton's The Ready and Easy Way tried to counter this appeal directly by contesting the promised stability of lineal kingship and arguing that, though kings die, a senate would be "eternal" and "immortal" (CPW 7: 436). 2 Milton's pleas fell flat, however, and England embraced hereditary monarchy with the return of Charles II.Despite the defeat of the Restoration, Milton continues the project of disentangling family and government he began in his antimonarchic prose tracts through his parallel representations of the figures of Sin and Eve. Using contrasting poetic forms to convey the origins of these characters, he not only demonstrates the corruption of royalist family-based government, but also elaborates a distinction between the world of government and the newly emerging domestic couple. This essay will explore how the birth scenes of Sin and Eve, as well as the scenes of the Son's begetting and his relation to the Father, respond to both the reign of Charles I and the disappointments of the Interregnum. By providing a new understanding of the politics of begetting in Paradise Lost, this analysis will demonstrate how the poem participates in Milton's antiroy...