From the Gaps / Con/textual Representations / A Meditation on Chaos: Literary, Scientific, Political

Pregnant with twins in 2016, I underwent an emergency cesarean due to preeclampsia, a procedure and diagnosis I was underprepared for and did not wholly understand, even as it was happening. At 33 weeks and 4 days pregnant, my blood pressure was 140 over 100, my face, hands, feet were beyond swollen. The obstetrician sent me to labor and delivery. In the hospital, nurses struggled to hear both babies’ heartbeats and doctors were concerned I might have a seizure. These conversations happened both with and around me, but without much consideration of my input or other alternatives, the doctors proceeded with the cesarean. From doctor’s office to hospital, the birth was over in four hours.

Afterward, when I researched preeclampsia—high blood pressure associated with swelling in the body and protein in the urine that can lead to eclampsia (seizures)—I learned it is linked to the placenta, another organ I did not fully understand, though the cause of preeclampsia remains unclear. A proactive and potentially dangerous force in a woman’s body, the placenta is an organ of the fetus comprised of the DNA of both genetic parents. Given that its job is to preserve the life of the fetus by hacking into the mother’s blood supply for food, the placenta must find balance with the uterus for gestation and birth to be successful. If not, the risks are life threatening and can lead to a variety of maternal complications from hypertension to hemorrhaging to death.

As a poet, I began to draw connections between the experience of my uterus and the depictions of chaos in John Milton’s intimate revisioning of creation in the epic poem Paradise Lost.¹ Milton often uses female anatomical language to describe chaos: “Into this wild abyss/The womb of nature and perhaps her Grave” (ll.910-11). John Rumrich’s scholarship on Milton, theorizing chaos as God’s womb, contextualized my reading,” for seeing chaos as a womb (God’s or not) alongside Milton’s descriptors, led me to ask questions about the biological function of the human uterus.² And in that process, I discovered striking similarities between Milton’s warring chaos and a uterus during pregnancy.

This image—chaos as womb—oscillates in my mind, merging Milton’s wrangled landscape with my own pregnancy and birth story. In this elastic, watery space “matter [is] unform’d and void” until “vital virtue infus’d.”  Two developing fetuses generate protective barriers and establish boundaries, two placentas compete for dominance over my uterus in a bloody battle for resources: “black tartareous cold Infernal dregs/Adverse to life; then founded” (VII.233, 236, 238–9). It is in this uterine-like space that the Anarchs—allegorical figures who rule chaos—take pleasure in the disorder that reinforces their necessity and justifies their power, all under the guise that the natural order of things requires intervention:

The force of “Eternal Anarchy” in this generative landscape—violent, undeveloped—reads as something unpredictable and only partially understood due to that unpredictably. Its power lies in that strategic approach masked as intractable, similar to the cancer-like nature of placental cells. Not only unpredictable, cancer cells are powerfully adaptive, eternally strategizing, and potentially devastating. Placental cells behave in a similar manner, as they too possess the ability to dismantle blood cells. In fact, as the fetus grows and needs more nutrients, the placenta will go to extreme measures to feed the growing fetus, in some instances creating diversions in the form of mini explosions, in order to access the blood supply in a different part of the uterus while the body’s defense system is otherwise occupied.³

Throughout the warring landscape of Milton’s chaos, “Eternal Anarchy” “stand[s],” sanctioned by the Anarchs to sustain perpetual fear and ruin. The word “hold” is of equal interest in this passage, with the comma before the word and the line break following it reading as both the act of possessing and containing. In a space like chaos where there is no particular order, no “bound,”⁴ “Eternal Anarchy” functions with both freedom and restraint, modulated by the Anarchs. If chaos is a womb, as Rumrich theorizes, then perhaps Eternal Anarchy is the placenta, sometimes “held” and in balance with the uterus, and yet other times an active force that defies boundaries.

Scholar Julie Stone Peters uses Paradise Lost to explore geographies, borders, and law in a diplomatic context, examining the tension between protection and rule: “The establishment of sovereign boundaries watched over by a global legal order that preserves the right to transgress those boundaries in order to protect the ordered sovereignty they represent: this has become our central paradigm of world order.”⁵ The paradox here, violation in the name of preservation, has become so commonplace in the United States it is often defended in the name of protection. Initially, when I read Peters’s essay, I was steeped in the landscape of chaos, its link to the placenta, and how this organ, barely understood by most, seemed to embody this imperialist principle, reinforcing the instability of eternal anarchy. But as the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022 and individual states began enacting a myriad of laws restricting and banning women’s access to healthcare, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Anarchs in Paradise Lost, these allegorical figures ruling chaos, consciously inciting violence for their own benefit.

Much of the early scholarship on Milton’s chaos reinforces the evil connotation of both the allegorical figures and the landscape.⁶ For instance, as the Anarch Chaos promotes a cycle of violence, he points Satan toward Eden and praises his intention to undo mankind, for it does not go unnoticed that Satan’s malevolent acts will benefit the Anarchs.  Recent scholarship, however, offers a more neutral analysis, shifting the focus from the Anarchs embodiment of evil to chaos as a generative space.⁷ Initially I dismissed the role of the Anarchs in order to separate them from chaos as landscape, because doing so allowed me to see the landscape in its emerging state, to unwind the evil connotation from chaos as womb and to view it as a complicated organ tasked with incredible challenges. I had to. I couldn’t sit with Milton’s chaos or my own—the one that led to preeclampsia, an early birth and weeks in NICU—and be satisfied with a surface-level characterization of the womb as evil. The poem and my experience demanded more. My uterus and their placentas were not evil. They were battling inside me all the time, but we were risk factors and biological functions, both commonly known and not known. We were not evil. Now, as various legal entities in the United States are intentionally denying women the right to make decisions about their own bodies, the Anarchs’ presence resonates differently. Was I supposed to dismiss the one-dimensional characterization of the Anarchs only to later realize that I had overlooked the power structure ruling the womb and propagating a cycle of violence within it? What exactly did Milton intend and who was he drawing on as he constructed these figures that lurk in the shadows—titled but nameless, titled but faceless, without a humanity to appeal to?

Peters’s essay, while acknowledging more neutral criticism on chaos, reinforces the lawless nature of the chaos landscape: “Chaos offers us a figural rendering of war that generalizes what we have learned from the War in Heaven: war is the condition of a disordered cosmos not yet subject to territorial order or rule of law.”⁸ Yet, I would argue that despite appearances, chaos is not “all disordered” with respect to both the landscape and the allegorical figures themselves, for there is an agenda, some “rule of law” at work. The Anarchs are governing, but not in the interest of anyone outside of the allegorical power structure. Their governance epitomizes Peters’s paradox: violence to defend, violence to preserve. And so, as I consider Milton’s intentions with the Anarchs, I cannot help but think about the numerous judicial appointments from 2017–19 in the United States at the district and federal level: 147 District Court Judges, 54 Federal Appeals Court judges; 226 in total, the majority of which are white, male, and with conservative views on issues like abortion.Without much national attention, these appointments were made alongside the persistent drafting of states’ anti-abortion laws, waiting for the newly stacked Supreme Court to revisit Roe. 

And in June of 2022, both Roe and Casey were reversed with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, almost exclusively declaring abortions after fifteen weeks illegal. In a June 2022 New Yorker editorial, Jia Tolentino contextualizes societal concerns before Roe and with its reversal, as technology has shifted the focus to abortion pills, surveillance, and fetal personhood. Close to twenty states in the US have constitutional support for their exceedingly restrictive abortion regulations and bans, and laws have been passed in states like Arkansas and Texas that track those who seek advice or are considering an abortion in a state database. These laws encourage citizens to track others and file suit against anyone who obtains or assists someone in accessing an abortion.⁹ Under them, women are viewed as vessels for fetal development, and the current strong push toward legalizing fetal personhood will result in increased governance, requiring women to place the life of a fetus over their own, returning us to Peters’ paradoxical concern: “The legal prohibition of violence and an insistence of violence is at the heart of the global legal order.”¹⁰

Restricting abortion access, forcing women to carry a fetus to term with no account for her health, life circumstances, and desires, is an act of violence. Legislating women’s bodies perpetuates a continued ignorance about women’s reproductive health by restricting informed conversations, as apprising oneself of the risks of pregnancy and options for care in the current political climate may result in surveillance and legal action. This lack of information and invasion of privacy compound the known risks of pregnancy, amplifying the threat to female personhood. Once again, women are left to navigate without access to clear information about their bodies. Milton’s introductory descriptor of chaos, “Into this wild Abyss,/The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,” continues to be a most apt depiction (II.910–11).

The placenta is at the root of many maternal complications during childbirth and postpartum, yet most people are unaware of the potential threat or warning signs of hypertensive complications, and the American health system does not always hear and respond seriously to women’s symptoms and concerns. Preeclampsia, the leading cause of maternal mortality, impacts 1 in 2000 pregnancies in the United States, and it is estimated that roughly 60% of those deaths may have been avoided if pregnancy complications and symptoms were more universally understood. This lack of clarity regarding reproductive health and childbirth is not new; it has been propagated for centuries. My pregnancy was borne under this cultural silence, one that shaped me as I participated in it. I did not ask enough questions. Often I didn’t know what to ask. My questions were given space for articulation only in retrospect.

I was, in other words, within Milton’s complicated descriptors of chaos: “The Secrets of the hoary deep, a dark/Illimitable Ocean without bound/Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,/And time and place are lost” (II.891–94). The word “secrets” and its implications are troubling. Initially I read “secrets” as the unknown, that which cannot be fully reconciled despite our best efforts. Now “secrets” seem to reinforce a sanctioned myth of unknowability with respect to conception, gestation, and birth. That the female body should only be partially understood is at the root of American patriarchy. And what isn’t generally understood must remain unknown. Don’t speak about it. Don’t question it, for not only are these “secrets” unreconcilable, but they’re also lost in the “hoary deep,” willfully wrapped in ancient yet familiar myth. To untangle the “secrets” in the “hoary deep” seems impossible, for how do we undo the logic of the paradox reinforced by our judicial system? How do we push back on the argument that “potential life,” or “the life of an unborn human being,” as noted in the Supreme Court opinion delivered by Justice Alito, is more valuable than ones’ own existing life?

Despite the science (albeit with the unknowns that remain, unknowns shaped by silence and the lack of value women hold in science), American society is hesitant to engage in frank conversations about the female body. It is as if when we talk about the anatomy of the reproductive system and the threat to women who carry a fetus to birth, we undo the mystery and miracle of creation, we unravel the myth of the female body—a reproductive and a sexual body—one that bears both pleasure and pain, one with agency and want. When we talk about the female as a person, we lose the ability to objectify her. The sexual object, the mother figure becomes someone real. The stakes are greater, and she becomes more difficult to regulate, to sacrifice in the name of human production. This is the context women are up against: “For every American woman who dies from childbirth, 70 nearly die. That adds up to more than 50,000 women who suffer ‘severe maternal morbidity’ from childbirth each year.” We must make a shift. We must value women as individuals with choice. And if they choose pregnancy, then they should do so as informed individuals, not as gestating and laboring wombs regulated under the misogynist frameworks of the state and federal government.

Chaos under the Anarchs in Paradise Lost is a site of war, sanctioned, deliberate. Current society under the United States Judicial System feels eerily similar—and begs for resistance. It’s time to stop living out Milton’s allegory.

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1. John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (Hackett, 2003): 211–469.  Hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the essay by reference to book and line number.
2. John Rumrich,  “Milton’s God and the Matter of Chaos,”  PMLA 110,  no.  (1995):. 1035–46.
3. See Yung W. Loke, “The Principal Players,” Life’s Vital Link: The Astonishing Role of the Placenta (Oxford University Press, 2018).
4. “The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark/Illimitable Ocean without bound” (I.89–94).
5. Julie Stone Peters, “A ‘Bridge over Chaos’: ‘De Jure Belli’, ‘Paradise Lost’, Terror, Sovereignty, Globalism, and the Modern Law of Nations.” Comparative Literature 57, no. 4 (2005) 273–93. 
6. See Regina M. Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
7. See Peter Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, editors, The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 
8. Peters,  “A ‘Bridge over Chaos,’” 276.
9. Jia Tolentino, “The Talk of the Town: The Post-Roe Era.” The New Yorker, 4 July 2022, pp.15–18.
10. Peters,  “A ‘Bridge over Chaos,’” 274.

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  Lisa Ludden Perry

  Lisa Ludden Perry is the author of the poetry chapbook, Palebound, (Flutter Press, 2017). Winner of the 2025 Michael Rubin Work-in-Progress Award from Fourteen Hills for her poetry manuscript-in-progress, In the Body it Nests, other poems have been featured in the Colorado Review, The Dodge (Best of the Net nominee), and Epiphany. Her current manuscript project, a hybrid of life writing and scholarship, examines female anatomical language in John Milton’s Paradise Lost while telling the story of her own reproductive landscape. She is one of the coeditors for the upcoming anthology, What is Your NICU?: Redefining the NICU Experience from a Maternal Perspective, from Demeter Press.