Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

Satan’s birth of Sin is the initial physically creative act separate from
God, which results in gender difference, suggesting that reproduction
unmediated by God is a divisive act; second, Adam and Eve are
genderless, much like their angelic neighbors, until Eve submits to Adam,
a submission which results in a shift from conformity to difference and
Eve’s separation from God (as Adam becomes her mediator); third, the
fragmentation that occurs at and after the fall, including the physical and
spiritual separation from God, are associated with reproduction, as seen
in the curses, yet both Adam and Eve are subject to this separation and can
only access God through levels of mediation in the post-fall world; and,
finally, the hope of recovering conformity and genderless, God mediated
birth is re-established through the promise of Christ through Mary, the
‘second Eve,’ which will lead humankind back to uniformity. Therefore,
I posit that the binaries of male and female and the resulting acts of
reproduction, separate from God, are causes of division in the poem
that Milton attempts to eradicate through the promised immaculate
conception of Christ, allowing a return to “conformity divine” (Milton
XI. 606), which I suggest must be a genderless state of being; thereby,
Milton is more in-line with the proto-feminist portrayals of gender
relations and reproduction seen in the work of Cavendish than one may
presume.
Early in PL, Milton reveals that “spirits when they please / can either
sex assume or both” (I.423b-24), establishing the lack of sex distinction
amongst the fallen angels. It is unsurprising, then, that Satan is depicted
as the first mother, though always addressed by male pronouns and titles.
Sin refers to Satan as “Father” (Milton II.728), 7 yet the description of her
painful birth is undeniably reminiscent of the act of female childbirth.
Sin relates that Satan was surprised by a “miserable pain” (Milton II.753),
until she emerged from an “op’ning wide” (Milton II. 755), evoking the
physical discomfort and dilation that a woman experiences in childbirth.
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Thus, Satan is physically the mother of Sin. Unlike Adam’s birth of Eve,
wherein God puts Adam to sleep and peacefully extracts the-would-be Eve
from his body, the delivery of Sin is painful, unmediated, and physically
fragments Satan. Schwartz reads the births of Sin and Eve as exposing
seventeenth-century anxieties about the two types of childbirth: natural
birth and caesarian sections (206-207). Schwartz’ reading, then, would
suggest that God is the surgeon performing the caesarian, supporting
my argument that God is a mediator in the birth of Eve. However, this
historical perspective does not account for God’s direct relationship in the
forming of Eve, as “The rib He formed and fashioned with His hands, /
Under His forming hands a creature grew, / Manlike but different sex”
(Milton VIII. 469-71a). Adam’s delivery of Eve is not simply mediated
by God, but created by him. This godly creation results in a new sex, but
not a different gender, as both Adam and Eve remain genderless at this
point in the poem. In-line with Schoenfeldt’s astute analysis that through
the term manlike Milton “might express the novel phenomenon of sexual
difference free of hierarchical disparity” (323), I suggest that the emphasis
on sexual difference without a distinct power division is due to a lack of
gender hierarchy at this point, as Eve’s birth is created by God and thus
unifying. In contrast, Sin is created autonomously by Satan, resulting in
the division of himself and the unmediated creation of a gendered being,
Sin.
Sin is the first creation separate from God’s direct influence, and
unlike the other spirits, she is depicted as a decisively female being, though
monstrous on account of her continuous subjection to reproduction.
Sin is defined by her reproductive abilities, though she has no control
over them, and by her relationship to Satan, which is overtly sexualized;
thus, in-line with Wittig’s theory, her relationship to Satan immediately
genders her as it thrusts her into a subservient, and one dimensional,
position. Sin is also the first being in the poem to physically reproduce
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