EVE: In addition, her contention that Milton's text turns woman into a sexual plaything "to gratify the

senses of man" suggests, at this point, that woman's "fall" was and is sexual and not essentially epistemo- logical, since knowledge is precisely the "forbidden fruit" prohibited by patriarchal oppressors who impose ignorance and define women's subordinate sexual roles. Wollstonecraft thus implies that woman's intellectual "innocence" is actually formulated in masculine terms of coercive prohibition Finally, the Miltonic libertine corrupted by his sensual desires, "when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation," alludes to all the Miltonic (and satanic) references to soaring in Paradise Lost, especially Milton's boast that he intends "to soar Above the Aonian Mount" (1.15). In The Analytical Review (vol. 7, 1790)- the journal in which she reviewed books, off and on, for nearly a decade- Wollstonecraft noted that "Milton slackened his flight when he entered heaven, for with drooping wing did he vainly attempt to soar where the boldest imagina- tion is soon overwhelmed with silent despair," underscoring her preference for Milton's "satanic" books and reinforcing what had already become a cultural commonplace (Works, 7:250). In this context, Wollstonecraft writes out both the fall of Milton and her correspondent feminist flight. She inverts, as will be seen, the biblical consequences of the Fall, resulting in woman's explicit subordination to man (see Genesis 3:16; Paradise Lost 10.195-6), and transforms Eve's eating of "knowledge" into an act of independence and empowerment By equating Miltonic innocence with political and psychological childhood (and the obedience and submission this entails), Wollstonecraft begins transforming the mythic act of feminine disobedience (the eating of forbidden knowledge) into a feminist act of liberation W suggests that in order to achieve "knowledge" and hence freedom and indepen- dence, women must rebel and disobey the patriarchal injunctions that equate knowledge with the forbidden province of "masculinity." In- deed, she subverts the very terms of Paradise Lost, celebrating satanic rebellion and disobedience, and, in doing so, begins entangling herself in a series of satanic positions, for rebellion against patriarchal authority is the sin of both Satan and Eve. Many of her arguments, for instance, resemble both Satan's and Eve's rationalizations of rebellion against God's "tyranny." When she com- ments that the purpose of education is to "enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent" and that "it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason" (RW, 90), she begins an allusive turn reminiscent of Eve's contention (when she first exercises her reason against Adam) that the nature of labor in paradise requires their temporary separation and hence her initial independence (see PL, 9.205-384). In addition, her argument, throughout, that men have conspired to keep women weak by prohibiting them knowledge is also, mutatis mutandis, Satan's argument to Eve: God has forbidden "knowledge" in order "to awe" and keep His "worshippers" in a state of ignorance (PL, 9.703-04). Satan also equates knowledge with liberation and power- with "rea- son" and independence. His subversive question (PL 9.725-26), "... and wherein lies / Th' offense, that man [woman] should thus attain to know?" reverberates throughout Wollstonecraft's text Wollstonecraft is not unwittingly enmeshing herself in these satanic echoes; she is deliberately replicating them. She, in effect, takes the first act of female disobedience inscribed in the texts of patriarchal tra- dition and transforms it into an act of emancipation. She crystallizes the terms of female independence- the reason, labor, and knowledge that Milton qualifies

But there are some redounding Miltonic ironies. For instance, Woll- stonecraft argues that women are "drawn out of their sphere" by the intoxicating "regal homage" of male language, and hence it is difficult to convince them that their "illegitimate power" (male "homage" to female "beauty") actually degrades them and "is a curse" (RW, 90). Although this is a recurrent Wollstonecraftian theme (cf. 164, 169)- the language of "regal" beauty psychologically debilitates women by conditioning them to act out the enslaving stereotypes of a chivalric lan- guage disingenuously worshipful- the reader remembers that the first enactment of this language thematically occurs in Satan's linguistic deification of Eve in Paradise Lost: Empress of this fair World, resplendent Eve, But all that fair and good in thy Divine Semblance, and in thy Beauty's heav'nly Ray United I beheld; no Fair to thine Equivalent or second, which compeli' d Mee thus, ... to come, And gaze, and worship thee of right declar'd Sovran of Creatures, universal Dame. (9.568, 606-12; cf. Eve's satanic dream in Book 5, 45-46, 74) In Paradise Lost, Satan's linguistic deification of Eve is the deceptive idolatry that precipitates both her fall and her correspondent "curse." Although Eve initially suspects the Serpent's "overpraising" (PL, 9.615), she is seduced through a language that glorifies her beauty and promises her empowerment through knowledge. Wollstonecraft hence unwittingly provides the terms for a subversive counterrevolutionary reading, in which she herself tempts woman to partake of "fallen" knowledge. If Satan and Eve are the real hero and heroine of her book, a counterrevolutionary reader would see them in and through the lan- guage of Milton.5 In her feminist reading, of course, the real satanic tempters are those Miltonic men who pay "regal homage" to the women they keep weak and "fallen." It is the seductive language of patriarchy that is one of the metaphoric "apples" of Wollstonecraft' s book- a deceptive language that seemingly elevates woman but actually degrades her- and not the true knowledge that patriarchy prohibits. Wollstonecraft hence urges a return "to nature and equality" (both suppressed in the fallen patri- archal past) which she projects in a revolutionary future when even kings and nobles will "throw off their gaudy hereditary trappings" and women will transparently resign the "arbitrary power" of feeble beauty (RW, 90-91).