SOURCE: Turner, James Grantham. “Love Made in the First Age: Edenic Sexuality in Paradise Lost and Its Analogues.” In One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton, pp. 230-309. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1987.

In this excerpt, Turner examines Milton's depiction of sexuality before the Fall, observing that Milton appears to envision an innocent eroticism and equal partnership not entirely in keeping with the later admonitions of Raphael and Christ.

2. Passion and Subordination

Milton's vision of pre-lapsarian sexuality, like the landscape of Paradise where it unfolds, is distinguished from all others by its capacity for ‘growth and compleating’. Our sense of Milton's erotic universe grows throughout the central books of Paradise Lost, not only by accumulation of detail, but by an increasing awareness of complexity; each successive episode involves confrontation with a new form of erotic sensibility (Satan, Raphael) or a new aspect of...