Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide

The historical-political context

• Marriage and the right of man to seek divorce, in an unhappy marriage was something that Milton worried about after his first wife, Mary Powell abandoned him. 

• Milton appealed to parliament in a prose treatise called 'The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce' to allow a man to divorce his wife and remarry on grounds of intellectual incompatibility resulting in loneliness of desertion. 

• Milton wrote 4 highly unorthodox, divorce tracts 

• According to English canon law - complete dissolution of marriage bond allowing the parties to remarry if there was threat of polygamy or incest or if one person entered the marriage because they were forced

• Milton argued that marriage was to alleviate loneliness in fit companionship therefore it is unchristian an uncharitable to allow a marriage if the conditions are not met

• Presence of marriage in paradise- politicizes Eden

• A + E marriage = ideal married state where wife is obedient intellectual helpmeet to her husband but also ideal human household where masculine principles of rationality and hierarchical liberty must hold sway  

• A + E split the ideal spiritual and intellectual union they shared

• Fall becomes a type of divorce = dissolution of the ideal union between man and God, man and wife

• In earlier divorce tracts, Milton was snobbish towards those who entered marriage solely for the purpose of enjoying legitmised sexual intercourse 

• Milton stated that the act of procreation when enjoyed for its own sake 'a quintessence of an excrement' BUT narrator celebrates A + E's prelapsarian sexuality

• Love is founded not in lust but 'reason, loyal, just and pure.'

• Before the Fall, A + E enter 'Handed' but after inflamed with a sudden lust, Adam'seize' Eve by the hand dragging her 'nothing loath' into a 'shady bank' 

• In PL, the Fall and the loss of liberty entails debase human desires

• The resulting slavery of the rational faculties to sensual appetites and passions leave humanity in a state of naked shame divested of 'native righteousness'