There was a lot going on this week’s reading and I’m sure I could pick any number of major points to talk about, from feminism to the idea of the felix culpa. Instead of looking at those big concepts, I’m going to focus in on a really small detail that I find completely fascinating. That detail is Milton’s insertion of the qualifier ‘left.’ He does this on three occasions, one in reference to Sin, one to Hell and one to Eve. For the sake of space, I’ll only talk about the references to Sin and Eve.
In Book 2, Sin is reminding Satan of her birth. This story echoes the Greek myth of Athena’s birth where Zeus gets a splitting headache and suddenly a woman springs out of his head. The same thing happens with Satan and Sin, except Milton felt the need to qualify that Sin came out of the left side of Satan’s head; “on the left side op’ning wide...Out of thy head I sprung” (2.755,758). Why did he specifically say that it was on the left? I’ll get into that later. First, I have to talk about the reference to Eve.
In Book 8, Adam recounts how Eve was created. The Bible simply states that God took a rib but, once again, Milton qualifies that it was from the left side. According to Milton, “[God] stooping opened [Adam’s] left side, and took / From thence a rib” (8.465-466). Again, why is Milton so obsessed with the left? The answer to that is found in Book 10. As Adam argues with Eve after the Fall, Adam says that Eve is “all but a rib / Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, / More to the part sinister from me drawn” (10.884-886). At first glance, this doesn’t seem to relate much. He’s talking about his rib but that appears to be about it. But it’s not.
Being the Latin geek that I am, I happen to know that the word for ‘left’ in Latin is ‘sinister.’ That’s where the connection comes in. Adam, in calling Eve sinister is making a call back to her origin from the left side. So why did Milton make this connection? For a long time, there was a lot of superstition about the left and I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about it. All I really know is that left was considered evil, sinister if you will. This is why Milton associates Sin with left and Eve with left. By the transitive property, Milton also associates Eve with Sin. Why did he do that? Well, I think you can figure that out.
P.S. I commented on Christian’s and Kayla’s posts.
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