a dolls house/paradise lost special ones

Ibsen lets Torvald Helmer argue in a very similar way when in the final scene he is confronted with Nora’s threatening emancipation. Referring to gender norms in bourgeois society and in Christianity, he exercises patriarchal power by citing those restraining phrases:

‘First and foremost you're a wife and mother.’ ‘Can’t you understand your place is in your own home?’ ‘But if you can’t be guided by religion, let me stir your conscience.’

john stuart mill, the subjection of women

What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others

ibsen on gender

“There are two kinds of spiritual laws, two kinds of consciousnesses, one in the man and a quite different one in the woman. They don't understand each other; but woman is judged in the practical life by man's law, as if she were not a woman, but a man.”

nora on torvalds masculine pride

“— Torvald and his masculine pride, — it would be so embarrassing for him to know he owed anything to me.”

torvald on noras feminine helplessness

“I wouldn't be a man if precisely this feminine helplessness didn't make you twice as attractive to me.”

nora and seriousness in marriage

“Hasn't it struck you that this is the first time that you and I, husband and wife, have talked seriously to each other?”

noras identity and humanity

“first and foremost I'm a human being just as you are — or at least I must try and become one.”

adam freely sins

Certain my resolution is to die … from thy state / Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe

Satan’s temptation of Eve is a textbook positive-liberty appeal. He recasts God’s prohibition as an obstacle between Eve and her true self (x) and offers self-realisation through eating: you will “be as gods”. The prohibition is reframed as interference, and freedom becomes becoming what you really are. Satan also uses his own transformation as proof, since the serpent has supposedly risen above his nature by eating.

to keep ye low and ignorant, / His worshippers?, be as gods

• Eve argues for something like negative liberty: virtue must be tested without supervision (x). This echoes Milton’s Areopagitica argument against “cloistered virtue”.

• Adam’s definition is rationalist, closer to positive liberty: “God left free the Will, for what obeys / Reason, is free” (ix. 351-52). Freedom means self-government by reason.

• Yet he lets her go (“Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more”, ix. 372), honouring non-interference as God does. That is the poem’s costliest demonstration of what negative liberty permits.

what is Faith, Love, Virtue unassayed

• Eve argues for something like negative liberty: virtue must be tested without supervision (“what is Faith, Love, Virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?”). This echoes Milton’s Areopagitica argument against “cloistered virtue”.

• Adam’s definition is rationalist, closer to positive liberty: “y” (ix. 351-52). Freedom means self-government by reason.

• Yet he lets her go (“Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more”, ix. 372), honouring non-interference as God does. That is the poem’s costliest demonstration of what negative liberty permits.

God left free the Will, for what obeys / Reason, is free

• Eve argues for something like negative liberty: virtue must be tested without supervision (“what is Faith, Love, Virtue unassayed / Alone, without exterior help sustained?”). This echoes Milton’s Areopagitica argument against “cloistered virtue”.

• Adam’s definition is rationalist, closer to positive liberty: “God left free the Will, for what obeys / Reason, is free” (ix. 351-52). Freedom means self-government by reason.

• Yet he lets her go (“z”, ix. 372), honouring non-interference as God does. That is the poem’s costliest demonstration of what negative liberty permits.

Go; for thy stay, not free

Adam’s fall is the clearest exercise of negative liberty in the poem: uncoerced and fully informed. But what he chooses is belonging over obedience (x), which is also a loss of self-mastery. He is “y” (ix. 999).

to lose thee were to lose myself, fondly overcome with female charm

So a fairer reading may be that the poem has a negative-liberty structure (God leaves the choice open, never interferes) but a positive-liberty ethics (real freedom means reason governing appetite, which the Fall destroys). Satan’s offer is then a counterfeit positive liberty: it defines the “true self” as ambition and status rather than reason and obedience. Berlin would say this is the usual danger of positive liberty, that someone else defines your real self for you.

okay

judith butler

“The doctor who delivers the child, pronounces: ‘It's a girl!’ and thereby begins ‘that long string of interpellations by which the girl is transitively girled;