Since its first publication in 1667, Milton's Paradise Lost has continued to exert its influence on literature, having particular resonance among the Romantics, Wordsworth citing it as one of the "department stores" - houses of the enthusiastic and meditative Imagination'. Milton took what Genesis had proposed in a few short lines and created a compelling and artful epic, using the story of creation to justify God's ways to men. The use of the Bible as inspiration and basis for the poem lent authority to Milton's text, and thus his detailed portraits of Adam and Eve became particularly influential in discussions of the nature of men and women in general, having arisen from these two" parents". Milton's Eve gives credence to the attitude common in her era, that women, though creations of God, are inferior to men: "both not equal, for their sex seemed not equal." [Book IV] It is through Eve's weakness of pride and vanity that humanity comes to fall into the Bible and poetry. However, for women writers who lived in the late 17th and 18th centuries, the political climate opened up a physical and imaginative space in which they had the opportunity to challenge these gender perceptions propagated by Milton's influential work. As Margaret Doody explains, “in England immediately after 1660 (and during the Revolution of 1688-89), ontologies of both gender and politics were radically fragmented,” and in this period “for the first time it was truly possible for a woman enter [the] public sphere of the kingdom" through writing. Radical political change occurred rapidly, creating a sense that public opinion could be influenced and changed more easily than in previous years, and indeed Doody goes on to comment that “aggression is a dominant tone or manner of the Restoration, and aggression in question is one of its norms." Milton's Eve was a figure after whom, literally, all other women were believed to be modeled, and for women writers who had not existed in the "public realm" for long, her work provided a popular foundation to work from. In order for these women writers to make their way in the literary world, it was necessary to find a way to dispel the inferiority and weakness generally perceived in women. Returning to the origins of woman and original sin and integrating the external forces acting on Eve meant tackling the problem at its root. Knowingly or not, these women, without directly contesting its content, attempted to reshape women in the public sphere by filling in the gaps that Milton had left open, reformulating his poetry in different ways. Just as Milton drew from the Bible for textual authority, writers such as Margaret Astell and Aphra Behn drew from Milton's ideas for the same purpose, paying homage to the work, of which Virginia Woolf once stated that "all other poetry is the dilution". Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in particular, works structurally to dispel feminine clichés before suggesting a new beginning for women on a retreat, "which will usher you into a paradise like the one your mother Eve lost." [19]Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Diane McCcolley defends Milton's "radical" treatment of Eve, arguing that "Milton was radical in making Eve an ardent guardian of the natural world, a passionate, sensual, and purely erotic partner, a spontaneous composer of exquisite lyrical and narrative poetry, a participant in numerous types of conversation including political debate. Although perhaps "radical" for its time,.Milton repeatedly informs us in clear terms that, despite all these faculties, Eve remains inferior to Adam: "She yielded with timid submission, modest pride." [Book IV] Related to this inferiority, McCcolley's point that Eve is a "participant" in conversation and debate is interesting, and something that Mary Astell, in her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, also identifies. Many critics have noted that after Eve tasted the tree of knowledge, her oratory skills greatly improved in their persuasiveness, much like Satan's skill. However, it is also true that in her state of innocence Eve is still able to reason and be persuasive, as exemplified in Book IX where she explains to Adam that they should divide the work between them separately: "We divide our labors, you where the choice / leads you, or where it needs most, whether to wrap / the honeysuckle around this pergola, or direct / the entwined ivy to climb, while I / in that spring of roses mixed / with myrtle, find what to repair until midday :/For while we are so close thus all day/We choose our task, how wonderful if so close/Glances intervene and smile, or new object/Random speech they draw upon, which interrupts/Our day's work brought to little, though begun /Early, and the dinner hour comes unearned'. [book IX] She gently coaxes him with the collective address, "let us," and her pleasantly sonorous alliterative speech, "where," "if," "wind." 'Honeysuckle' forces Adam to comment: 'Well done you sign, well your thoughts busy'. [book IX] Adam's praise seems like a clear indication that his reasoning skills are good and, beyond that, they manage to influence him, suggesting that his reasoning ability is as good, if not better than Adam's. Astell expresses this sentiment saliently, writing, “GOD has given women as well as men an intelligent soul,”[22] using established logic to justify that without the ability to reason, hierarchically, women would be no better than animals. Eve's productive conversation in this part of the poem is undermined by the fact that, fundamentally, her success in "winning" the argument put her in a position of vulnerability that led to the Fall, implying that the power persuasive in women is a dangerous thing. In her writings, Astell does not seek to express the sentiment that women are infallible, but disagreeing with the implications that Eve's reasoning power has, she turns to other biblical figures to level her textual support: "The Holy Spirit having left recorded, that Priscilla, as well as her husband, catechized the eloquent Apollos and the great apostle found no fault in her.'[24] Invoking Priscilla here diverts the reader's attention from Eve to one woman's success story which uses power and responsibility, placing Eve, perhaps the most infamous woman in the Bible, in a context where she is one among many other more devout women, showing her to be an anomaly: 'she must be as bad as Lucifer himself who after such enjoyments can abandon her Paradise. “It is unreasonable to imagine such an apostasy, the supposition is monstrous, and therefore we may conclude that it will never, or very rarely, happen.” However, as the supposed first woman and mother of all women after, Eve remained, and she remains a representative figure of women and femininity, and both the Bible and Paradise Lost clearly expose Eve's vulnerabilities and the serious consequences these had. From the beginning of Milton's poem, Eve's memory of her creation suggests that her susceptibility to vanity and pride, both sins committed by Lucifer: "WhileI bent down to look, right in front, / A shape within the water" A light appeared / Bending to look at me I went back, / It began again, but happy because I returned soon, / Happy it returned quickly with responding looks / Of sympathy and love; there I had fixed / My eyes until now, and I was pining with vain desire, / If a voice had not warned me, What you see, / What you see there, beautiful creature are you yourself' [Book IV] Eve's admiration for what is her reflection draws immediate parallels with the classical myth surrounding Narcissus, who met his end due to a very similar vanity, and indeed, the phrase "destroyed by vain desire", leads one to imagine that "a voice" had not warned Eve of what she was doing, she might equally have continued to look at each other in vain forever. Her beauty is the defining characteristic that marks the difference between her and Adam, and the characteristic constantly reinforced, as we see even in these lines when she is told to refrain from admiring herself, she is called, somewhat paradoxically, a "beautiful creature". Astell does not object to this trope of vanity, but instead captures the inevitability of the paradox that women face: "she who has nothing else upon which to evaluate herself, will be proud of her beauty, or of money, and of what she can acquire; and she thinks she is strongly obliged to him, who tells her that he has those perfections which she naturally desires. Her innate self-esteem and desire for good, which have degenerated into pride and self-love, will easily open them ears to whatever happens to feed and delight them. They have in them the capacity for vanity and pride. However, what she makes clear and Milton does not is that these sins are fed, calling “pride and wrong self-love” a “ degeneration", suggesting a state descended and brought about not only by the woman herself but by "him". ', the man who encourages her only in the pursuit of beauty, perpetuating her degeneration into sin. Given this, the seduction of Eve by of Satan begins to make more sense, as she does not use flattery in a completely different way than the way she has been spoken of throughout the poem. The "voice" that speaks to Eve about her creation calls her a "beautiful creature", while Satan describes her as the "most beautiful likeness of your creator", also noting her "heavenly beauty" where she was previously described as "angelic ". By highlighting the cycle of vanity fueled by those around them, Astell provides a new framework for looking at women's vanity, and we reperceive the incident, seeing Satan's words as ventriloquism of the kind used by Adam, and even God himself to talk to them. Vigil. Astell complains with "resentment" that women should "enshrine nothing better than Egyptian deities", a description with a sense of emptiness, criticizing the view of women as aesthetic objects and nothing more. Sandra Gilbert, writing on patriarchal poetry, suggests that Milton draws deliberate parallels between Eve and Satan, suggesting that "Milton's Eve falls for exactly the same reason as Satan: because she wants to be 'like God' and because, like him, she is secretly dissatisfied with her position." Although these parallels are evident and further reinforce the demonization of Eve and the female gender, the most marked difference between Eve and Satan lies in their upbringing, a point that writers such as Astell have worked on in their attempts to review the role and perception of women. Satan, or "Lucifer" before his fall from grace, was an angel very close to God in a similar way to Adam. Eve, however, while still a creation of God, is excluded from certain things that Adam has access to. The fall of Lucifer was considered with full.