Characterized by its internal conflicts, John Milton's Paradise Lost invites us to reconsider Bakhtin's assertion that in poetic genres, "artistic consciousness" fully realizes itself within its own language. Milton's abnegation of authorial power enables his free-willed characters to articulate thoughts that are not necessarily his and to compete with the poet's narrating voice for reader's attention. However, treating Paradise Lost as a monologic text, feminist critics of Milton in the last three decades assume that the epic is governed by a privileged discourse that reflects Milton's attitudes toward women. As a result, the scholarly investigation of Milton's representation of women has become, at its best, an interrogation of a single author's sexual politics.;In this thesis I argue that the various accounts of the female characters (Sin and Eve) in Paradise Lost are underpinned by two influential essentialist ideologies of the Renaissance period, namely, the Galenic-Aristotelian notion of women, which constructs the female identity on a set of physiological traits, and the Hebraic-Christian notion of women, which defines gender as a mentality that is most conspicuous during the fall. The dominance of the Hebraic-Christian notion of women in Milton's epic is concomitant with the epistemological emergence of a new gender discourse during the inception of the Foucauldian classical period, which, though generating a better image of the female, helps facilitate the relegation and domestication of women in patriarchal society.