e two are complementary rather than opposite:
For Milton, the war between flesh and spirit is not a divine creation. the conflict is the result of, not the cause of, the fall. the mode of the garden is myth, not psychological realism.
The mode of myth helps us understand Eve and her function. A realistic reading of the story would have a very different effect than a reading based on myth, as Miller notes:
A realistic reading is inevitable, yet such a reading makes a vicious monster of God, a petty tyrant of Adam, and an idiot of Eve. . . By seeing the first humans as simultaneously realistic and allegorical, we may get a glimpse of their mythic reality.
Adam and Eve are the first two human beings and have been made prime upon the earth. There is an allegorical meaning to the primacy of Adam over Eve, for he represents reason which should govern passion, mind which should govern body: "The head must command the heart even as it draws nourishment from its servant."
One of the problems we face when examining the role of Eve is that we bring too much knowledge to the task. A realistic reading is misleading, and if we introduce modern conceptions of psychology and motivation, we are doing so to a very different Eve than the one created by Milton. The search for inward motives, appetites, and emotions would not be understood by Milton:
Nothing could be farther from the seventeenth-century conviction that one is called by God and empowered by his Spirit to do her or his work in the world, and that this delegation of creativity and providence is the fount of human dignity and right relation and a major source of joy. . . the Garden is not only, as it is so often seen, a mirror of Adam's and Eve's emotional states, though it is affected by them. It is an organic community of interconnected lives to which their healthy minds delightedly respond. Eve's suggestion that she work on her own for a bit is a part of h...