Character of Eve in Paradise Lost

This study will examine the character of Eve in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Specifically, the study will analyze Eve's motives for separating from Adam (before the temptation); for eating the fruit; and for sharing the fruit with Adam. Also to be considered is how and why her motives changed from situation to situation.

Eve is clearly portrayed by Milton as the cause of the fall from grace. In each scene, she seems to have made up her mind about what she is going to do---leave Adam to work separately in Eden, eat the fruit, and share the fruit with Adam---before she even starts considering. She shapes her reasoning to fit the decision she seems to have already made. Each decision is also clearly rebellious and/or selfish. Essentially, Eve does exactly what she wants to do, tempting danger at each point. Her motive in each case is to follow her own will and to resist the imposition of either the will of God or Adam.

In the first scene, Eve suggests to Adam that they will get more work done in tending Eden if they split up instead of working together. The implication seems to be that even though they start work early every day, they get little done because they keep distracting one another with their love: "For while so near each other thus all day/ Our task we choose, what wonder if so near/ Looks intervene and smiles, or object new/ Casual discourse draws on, which intermits/ Our day's work, brought to little, though begun/ Early, and th' hour of supper comes unearned!"

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pon before the reasoning began. She is easy pickings for the serpent with respect to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil: "His words, replete with guile,/ Into her heart too easy entrance won" (733-734). She would not have been open to the temptation of the serpent in his praise of the fruit had she not already been predisposed to eating it. Her motivation is simply the desire to possess the power that eating the fruit can give to her. Of course, she knows that the fruit is forbidden, so she cannot simply partake of it. She must come up with some rationalization first. It does not take her long: "Great are thy virtues, doubtless, best of fruits,/ Though kept from man, and worthy to be admired,/ Whose taste, too long forborne" (745-747). She uses everything God has said about the fruit to further her rationalization for her inevitable eating of it. God praised it, she says, which means to her that He was not trying to dissuade them from eating it. God's forbidding them from eating it, she says, makes it all the more attractive. She goes on and on about the desirability of the fruit, and the weakness of God's argument against eating it, but at the root of her discussion with herself is the single motivat

Category: Literature - C