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According to the third chapter of Genesis, when Eve "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took the fruit thereof, and did eat" (Gen. 3:6).1 The biblical account lists three related but discrete motivations for Eve's transgression: the apparent wholesomeness of the fruit as food, the visual attractiveness of the tree, and the allure of transgressive knowledge. In Paradise Lost, John Milton demands from his readers a subtler consideration of the interplay between perception, pleasure, and knowledge. At the initial moment of the Fall, Milton describes how
Eve
Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else
Regarded, such delight till then, as seemed,
In fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fancied so, through expectation high
Of knowledge, nor was godhead from her thought.
Greedily she engorged without restraint,
And knew not eating death.2
Although these lines conclude with the emphatic lesson that Eve "knew not eating death," they also complicate any straightforward understanding of her error. Eve's experience of the fruit overwhelms her regard for anything else; her attention becomes solipsistic, directed not necessarily on the fruit but rather on her own delight. The source of this delight remains uncertain. The phrase "whether true or fancied so" invites the reader to wonder whether the fruit is genuinely, intrinsically delicious or whether expectations of godlike knowledge make the fruit seem delicious in Eve's wayward experience.
What might it mean to decide that Eve is wrong to taste the fruit as delicious, or that she tastes the fruit as being more delicious than it really is? Such questions may seem trivial given all that is at stake in the mythic narrative. Yet Paradise Lost announces a concern for the taste of the fruit in its opening lines:
Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe[.]
(PL, 1.1-3)
This opening signals the centrality of disobedience against God, but it also emphasizes the physical vessel and the sensuous experience of the Fall. The taste of the fruit is, of course, inaccessible for Milton and for his readers-not only...