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“Families have always had problems. Adam and Eve disobeyed the landlord's rules and were evicted from their lovely estate.”
Milton's Paradise Lost is usually read as a moral tale, with the crisis turning on Adam and Eve's disobedience to God's law. This reading is justified on its own terms, but the poem may also be read as a story of the development of love in a family and the shifting attachments between its characters. When the epic is read solely as a story of disobedience, it is difficult to escape the contradiction between Milton's avowed purpose to “justify the ways of God to men” (1.26) and the impression that his God seems tiresome and his Satan heroic.1 The same contradiction appears in Milton's personal life. He was a devout Christian, but also a proponent of regicide, someone who would never favor in the literal world the hierarchy he imposes on Heaven in his poem. When Paradise Lost is read as a story of development, these contradictions can be understood as the consequences of both Milton's authorial ambivalence and the interpersonal conflicts among his characters as they experience the losses and gains of maturation. What is more, the difference between seeing disobedience as the single decisive event and seeing it as one of several stages in a story of developing relationships mirrors the divergence between an older classical and a more contemporary relational psychoanalysis.