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Title
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"...At the ear of Eve": hearing, gender, and the physiology of the fall in John Milton's Paradise lost.
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Creator
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Pollari, Niina., Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College
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Abstract/Description
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The organ of hearing, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, is inextricably connected with both the physical and the spiritual; it is the point of entry through which Satan's words enter Eve's brain, subsequently process, and lead eventually to the fall of mankind. Its symbolic importance is also indisputable, as it is a metaphor for the feminine passivity and penetrability that make Milton's Eve a particularly vulnerable target. There is, however, already a pre-existing connection between the ear...
Show moreThe organ of hearing, in John Milton's Paradise Lost, is inextricably connected with both the physical and the spiritual; it is the point of entry through which Satan's words enter Eve's brain, subsequently process, and lead eventually to the fall of mankind. Its symbolic importance is also indisputable, as it is a metaphor for the feminine passivity and penetrability that make Milton's Eve a particularly vulnerable target. There is, however, already a pre-existing connection between the ear and its role in Paradise Lost. The seventeenth-century medical texts of Milton's contemporaries gender the physiology of the ear and the process of hearing and therefore contribute to its importance in the pivotal temptation scene; that is, the rhetoric surrounding the physiology of the ear is the down fall of humankind in the epic poem. As a result of the dangerous connection between science and language, Milton's characters are already predestined to sin.
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Date Issued
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2006
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PURL
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http://purl.flvc.org/FAU/11583
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Subject Headings
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Symbolism in communication, Fall of man, Body, Human, in literature, Literature and science, History
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Format
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Document (PDF)
