"...At the ear of Eve"

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 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.