Childlessness, Monstrosity, and Redemption: Exploring Motherhood in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Abstract: Breaking with the patristic tradition, Milton introduces lovemaking between the first couple while they are still untainted in the Garden. This intimacy in their relationship allows the epic to highlight the tensions and paradoxes of biblical accounts of conception and childbearing. Though Eve is not generally numbered among the “barren women” of the Hebrew Bible, her delayed fertility in the epic parallels the experience of the Hebrew matriarch Sarah. Additionally, Eve’s childlessness at the Fall affords her a liminal space from which to contemplate the full implications of postlapsarian motherhood.