Feminist Milton 9781501743603

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FEMINIST MILTON

Also by Joseph Wittreich

The Romantics on Milton Angel

oj

Apocalypse

Visionary Poetics

Image of That Horror Interpreting “ Samson Agonistes”

Joseph Wittreich

FEMINIST MILTON

Cornell University Press

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright

©

1987 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof,

must not be reproduced

in

any form without permission

from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First

published 1987 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard

Book Number 0-8014-2069-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number

87-47607

Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information

appears on the

The paper

last

in this

page of the book. book

is

acid-free

and meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

Book Longevity of the Council on Library

Resources.

in

writing

Press,

124

go

little

book

to

Esther Harbage Richardson, Charlotte Calvin Voorhis, Joel Conarroe,

and James Thorpe

.

.

.

there

is

hue

their steps, dignity

in

their faces always,

and grace

.

.

.

wisdom

in

their eyes,

and

in

Our Wives

read Milton.

— Alexander Pope (1737) Milton disdained

me

not.

— Mrs. My

landlady,

who

her Milton; and fell

in love

is

tells

only

me,

with her, on

a taylor’s

that her late this

Pedia (1763)

widow,

reads

husband

first

very account; because

she read Milton with such proper emphasis.

— C.

P.

Moritz (1782)

Contents

Preface

A Note

•

ix

on Citations

1.

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

2.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

xxiii

i

in

Eighteenth-Century Criticism

16

3.

Milton’s Early Female Readership

44

4.

An

5.

A Confounding

Alternative Perspective on Milton and

Women

Text and Test Case

Appendix A: John Clowes, A Conversation between a Father and His Daughter Appendix B: Mary O’Brien, Ode to Milton Appendix C: Hannah More on Sentiment and Principle Appendix D: Hannah More’s Coelebs on Milton’s Eve Index

83

119

155

157 159 163

169

Preface We have not many patrons amongst

the

men;

let

us hear

all

that

has been said by any of the ungenerous sex in our favour, since

we

The ness

is

title

are pretty sure to hear their abuses.

— Hester Chapone

of

this

book

likely to surprise

is

all

to Elizabeth Carter

bold, deliberately so, and in

but those university

its

bold-

men who dubbed

Milton “the Lady of Christ’s.” Nevertheless, the title is also freighted with significance. On the one hand, it is intended to counter the cynicism evident in Lytton Strachey’s self-answering

by the largeness of his ‘view of life’? How wide, one would like to know, was Milton’s ‘view of humanity ’?” On the other hand, the title is meant to ally Milton with a specific community of readers and a question “Is

it

possible to test a poet’s greatness

1

community which, at come to be called “femi-

special critical consciousness within that least in its current manifestations, has

nist.” If the feminist enterprise involves deconstructing

“domi-

nant male patterns of thought” while “reconstructing female ex2 .perience previously hidden or overlooked ,” that enterprise pro-

vides this

book with an agenda. And

that agenda,

yields the conclusion that, in Milton studies,

tory and have had an influence of their

own

unexpected, that Milton was not just an

ally

once pursued,

women

have

a his-

— and perhaps more

of feminists but

their

early sponsor. In reviewing

women’s observations on Milton from about

'Lytton Strachey, Books and Characters: French and English (London: Chatto

and Windus, 1922), p. 18. 2 Gaylc Greene and Coppelia Kahn, “Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Women,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. ,

6

.

[ix]

— Preface

[x]

1700 to 1830,

this

book

restores a female perspective to Milton’s

writings. In the process,

paradigms of female

revises usual

it

sponse and simultaneously reveals not only how,

re-

in unpredict-

were reading Milton but also how their readand in some instances determined ings of his poetry affected interpretation. This is especially true for the Romantic period when, for example, the last books of Paradise Lost receive their first sustained critical appreciation and illumination. Milton’s able ways,

women

—

—

epic-prophecy text

—

ture.

is

in part a

a large part

It is

text

— indeed,

a lost

feminist

of which has been buried by patriarchal cul-

a text that invites

feminist criticism that tations

woman’s and has

its

own

would remove from

hidden agenda for

literary

a

works incrus-

of patriarchal interpretation.

This book reconstructs

of Paradise Lost

poem

a

female perspective on and experience

was

engaged in the dethroning of authority and in the formation of new gender paradigms, as a poem inscribed with, not by a received ideology concerning the sexes which, instead of transmitting, it would transform. No poem is a better witness to Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn’s proposition that “even when literature is potentially subversive, it has been made to function as part of a literary tradition that inscribes the

as a

that

itself

dominant ideology and marginalizes women.

Critical tradition reinforces

— even

when

literature

images of character and behaviour that encourage

.

.

does not

women

cept their subordination, either ignoring or degrading

.

to ac-

women,

or

them for such virtues as obedience, meekness and humilThe concerns of this book are manifold: historical reader-

praising ity.”

3

ships, especially

women;

the politics of reading, writing, and

interpretation; the canonizing of Milton’s poetry and the institu-

tionalizing of certain interpretations of

it,

at

what

cost

and

at

what loss; the complicated relation between literature and ideology and the collusion of criticism with ideology. In short, the book is about the ideological capture of Milton by one constituency of readers and his recapture by another. In fact, many of the concerns of this book are implicit in what Hannah Mitchell heard and said at a debate on women and politics: 3

Ibid. ,

p. 22.

Preface

[xi|

At that time the idea of women in politics was very unpopular. was both surprised and indignant at the sex prejudice displayed by most of the debaters, and sat in a silent rage listening to speeches which ranged from the frankly contemptuous to the sloppily sentimental, from Adam to St. Paul, until a callow youth, eager to show .

.

.

I

his learning,

ended

a

high-flown, but rather

speech with the

silly

statement that his opinion of women coincided with Milton’s:

“He and

for

down

sat

God

on

friend”

I

reading to

meeting

a

sprang to

his intimate

tions regarding the status of his

him,”

in

amidst great applause.

Without premeditation

“young

God

only; she for

my

feet,

congratulated our

knowledge of the Almighty’s

women, and

more democratic

suggested that he extend

poets, then flung at

him and

the

chunk of my recently acquired Tennyson:

“The woman’s cause is man’s; they dwarfed or Godlike, bound or free.”

rise

or

fall

“If she be small, slight natured, miserable,

men

inten-

together,

How

shall

grow ?” 4

Milton has obviously been co-opted by

male readership;

a

his

words are hurled at women but not now hurled by women back to men. The time has passed when women could and would enlist Milton as a rebel in their cause. This book tells the whats, whys, and hows of the history of women’s shifting attitudes toward Milton: what the horizons of expectation were on the part of Milton’s early readership (male and female), why those expectations changed, and how and with what consequences they changed. The paradigmatic response of women to Milton’s poetry shifts perceptibly at the onset of the Victorian period (that

is

another book) toward what, as represented by Hannah Mitchell,

now

it

its

typically

is.

What

that response

apprehension of Paradise Lost

now

4

in Milton’s

Hannah

Suffragette

Mitchell,

and Rebel,

or seems to be, in

document of and simply different from

as a principal

powerful sanction for patriarchal culture

what

is,

is

century and in the eighteenth and early nine-

The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography o f Hannah Mitchell, ed. George Mitchell (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 98.

Preface

[xii]

teenth centuries

it

had been

—

at least for

“hold of the signs and symbols of

made them speak female especially

was regarded

a

women who

male-dominated culture

truths to other

as a

then taking

woman’s

text

women .”

1

.

.

.

Paradise Lost

— not just one through

which women could challenge the cherished beliefs of Milton’s male readers, but one through which Milton himself had challenged those beliefs by fashioning a new female ideal with the intention of forging a new social and political reality. We are left with the irony, so finely formulated by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, that “when Milton abandoned political writing and retired into his poetry, he did not actually abandon politics. Rather, he entered directly into a struggle through which the values he held as a Protestant reformer and political activist would come to dominate British culture .” 6 The ironies of criticism proliferate when one remembers that, in the eighteenth century, a fictionized and libertarian wife justifies walking out on her husband by quoting Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce the same tract that in the twentieth century provides the “real” and reactionary Anita Bryant with passages to be recited in the divorce court to sanction her own walking out on a husband History’s images of Milton are as significant as the image of Milton that seems to prevail in our own time 8 This hermeneutic ,

7

.

.

difference

5

as striking as

illuminating. In the twentieth cen-

Proper Lady and the

Modern Language Notes, ioo (1985), 1251. See Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The History of Sexuality Writer, in

in Paradise Lost," Representations, 7

it is

Nancy Armstrong’s review of Mary Poovey’s The

See

Woman 6

is

See

Mary Walker’s Le

forthcoming. Munster

and Rotterdam, 1782), I, 141-42; and “Notes on People: Anita Bryant Calls on Milton for a Few Words,” New York Times, 26 July 1980, p. 20. *See Christine Froula’s

Village de

(2 vols.; Paris

“When Eve Reads

Milton:

Undoing

the Canonical

Economy,” Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983), 321-47; Froula’s “Pechter’s Specter: Milton’s Bogey Writ Small; or, Why Is He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Critical Inand Sandra Gilbert’s “Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton’s Bogey,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 93 (i97 8 ), 368-82, along with the exchange in the same journal between Sandra Gilbert and Philip J. Gallagher, “Milton’s Bogey,” 94 (1979), 319-22. Cf. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: quiry,

The

11

(1984), 171-78;

Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

(New Haven

and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 187-308; and Joan Malory Webber, “The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost," Milton Studies, 14 (1980), 3

- 24

-

Preface

women may

tury,

contrast the jubilation and admiration Milton

male readership with the despair he elicits from and with which he darkens the pages of their writings.

engenders

women From

[xiii]

in a

the late seventeenth century until about 1830,

women

sim-

ply thought differently. Writing in the nineteenth century, Lady

— who

Morgan

can mention

rapid succession Milton’s de-

in

who

fenses of the English people and his antiprelatical tracts,

members how .

.

of [this

.

|

upon Lost

“the untiring Stuarts thirsted for

.

.

defender of the British republic,” and

[the)

blood

who

insists

works and

ideological continuity between the prose

—

.

re-

Paradise

and representation of him,

typifies the response to Milton,

by an early female readership that more characteristically complains about male establishmentarian appropriations of Milton. Such appropriations, usually achieved by ideological emptyings of Milton’s poetry, were intended as counters to those who “deemed the name of the inspired author of ‘Paradise Lost’ a profanation ... of regal and prelatical greatness”; these ideological counters then contravened the

deflecting the subversive

spirit,

thrust of Milton’s

poem. Where

erected by and in

memory of

all

columns

to greatness are

“conservativism,” there

Lady Morgan laments, no gardens to memorialize the teeming mind” that, envisioning Paradise Lost, imbued liberal,

“full it

as

are,

and

with

a

aggressive republicanism. 9 Milton’s female readers, then

and now, do not always exhibit the same ideological commitments and thus find decidedly different messages encoded within the texts of Milton’s last poems. An early female readership found comfort and support in Milton’s poetry, although those same benefits disappeared from the text for later women readers. This observation raises the question, addressed throughout this study, whether such features are in Milton’s poems by design, or by superimposition, or (what seems more likely) by virtue of both.

Then,

as

now, some women were schooled

patriarchal culture, even dise Lost.

sometimes through the agency of Para-

Witness, for example, the “imaginary” conversation

composed by John Clowes,

''Lady

128-29.

into submission to

Morgan, The Book

a

clergyman for the Church of Eng-

without a

Name

(2

vols.;

London,

1841),

I,

126,

[xiv]

Preface

land,

and presented

to

its

as a “treatise”

intended “to restore marriage

primitive sanctity, purity, and bliss” by bringing

it

into

accord with the principles of Christian religion. Such principles are being subscribed to “not [as] a

amuse

mere science

to enlighten

and

the intellect of man, but [as] ... a rule of life, ... a living

whole man a new life and spirit, new ends and intentions, new hopes and delights, by forming him after the image and likeness of that Heavenly Father,” and it is clear from the ensuing conversation that “man” here is gender10 specific In that conversation, the nineteen-year-old Miranda principle,

.

.

.

infusfing] into the

.

tells

her clergyman-father Paternus that “marriage, properly so-

called,

united,

must mean an union of minds; and it

that if

cannot be properly called marriage.

minds

” In turn,

are not

Paternus

what constitutes a union of minds between the different sexes: “God, my child, has manifestly by creation, distinguished the man from the woman, and the woman from the man, not only as to body, but as to mind, not explains to his daughter

.

only as to corporeal strength and energy, but .

.

.

lect,

Thus

.

as to

mental faculty.

the proper distinguishing character of the

but the proper distinguishing character of the

As

love of man’s intellect.”

if

man

is

woman

intelis

the

having learned her lesson, Miranda

then cites her “favourite poet Milton (see

.

.

.

.

:

His words are these”

Appendix A): For contemplation he and valour form’d, For softness she, and sweet attractive grace;

He

for

God

only, she for

This conversation between

God

in

him.

clergyman and his teenage daughter, in every particular, epitomizes what feminist critics today tell us about how Milton was read with submission and obsequiousness. Miranda’s comments fit their paradigm of how women, a

—

educated into deference and obedience, willingly submit to the “wisdom” of the benevolent father who is a guardian for the mo-

of patriarchal culture, and how, in the process, women “often take on the father’s contemptuous devaluation of and

rality

10

By

See John Clowes, The Whole Duty of Woman; or, A Guide To Which Is Added The Golden Wedding-Ring;

a Lady.

riage (Stourbridge, 1815), pp.

.

.

iii,

.

6.

to the or,

Female Sex

.

.

.

Thoughts on Mar-

Preface

contemptuous

women

attitude for the

group."

as a

to be a writer, this

ground

When

mother and, by extension,

woman

the subjected

argument goes, Milton

as a literary father

[xv]

is

for

happens also

there in the back-

engendering “a dynamics of depen-

dence, as well as the subversion of the independent self” by

snaring

woman

into

making her accept

“patriarchal

literary

tradition”

a place “in a literary heritage that

and thus is

not her

own

and does not express her interests .” 12 Such is supposed to be the predicament of these self-styled daughters of Eve who are also Milton’s daughters

prehension)

is

sought

and from

— and

whom

compliance (not com-

also concession

— not just

to patriar-

imtraditions. If the conversation between Miranda and paradigmatic of the relationships here described, it

chal literature but also to the various patriarchal hierarchies plicit in its

Paternus

is

should be remembered that those relationships,

as well as the val-

ues implied by them, are forged by a male writer

who

in turn

would make of his daughter their representative and spokesperson. It should also be remembered that even if it is evidence for what modern-day feminists tell us about women submissively reading and interpreting Milton’s poetry, this conversation, in

own

time,

is

an anomaly, not

were regarding Milton or of

at all typical

how

they

of

how

its

female writers

were reading and

inter-

preting his poetry.

Such are the uses and abuses of Milton’s poetry by patriarchal culture, now and then. But an early female readership was for the most part determined to rescue Paradise Lost from those abuses. Milton may sometimes stand in his own way, but from the perspective of most early female readers he never meant to stand in their way. It was just this sort of prejudice and bigotry that most women and some men (more as the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth) opposed, and more often than not they registered their opposition by invoking the authority of Milton. Occasionally, through a tactic just the reverse of the one employed by Clowes, they create male characters who become mouthpieces and sanctions for

distinctly female

and even sometimes feminist

"Beth Kowalski-Wallace, quoting Jane Flax, in “Milton’s Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers,” Feminist Studies, 12 (1986), 281. l2

Kowalski-Wallace, “Milton’s Daughters,” pp. 277, 284.

Preface

[xvi]

perception and observation. In

fact,

what complicates both the

presentation and the argument in the following pages

women may make men

while

would

like to hear

the spokespersons for

about their sex,

egy and even by presenting

make women mouth

men

at

times

is

—

to

a patriarchy

patently misogynistic.

is

The

presentation and argument of this

plicated

ences

strat-

“By a Lady” making them seem

their texts as written

the platitudes, thus

that,

what they

— by inverting the

submit to the tenets of patriarchy, which that

is

by educational,

among

class,

the represented

political,

book

and ideological

women. Some

Mary Chudleigh

are further

are wealthy

com-

differ-

and well

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762); Catherine Macaulay (1731 -1791); Mary Walker, Lady Mary Hamilton (1739-1816); and Elizabeth Smith (1776-1806). Some are not so well connected; Mary Ann Radcliffe (1740?- 1810?), whose husband ate away her fortune, and Jane West (1758-1852), whose husband was a simple farmer. Alconnected: Lady

(1656-1710),

though social status and sometimes political allegiance determine the themes they chose, few of these women seem to have been straitjacketed by either. Mary Walker, for example, can write about the problems of marriage for aristocratic women but also campaign for the rights of all women to an education. The Royalist connections and sympathies of her family do not prevent Anne Finch from becoming a poet of female consciousness, nor does high social standing dissuade Catherine Macaulay from presenting a Whig interpretation of the Stuarts and the Civil War or from promoting radical feminist positions. Some, such as Mary Robinson (1758-1800), come from a bourgeois background, while others, such 1806),

come from working-class

clergymen:

Elizabeth

(1721 -1770), and ters

of

Carter

families.

Ann Yearsley (1752Some are daughters of

as

(1717-1806),

Catherine

Anna Seward (1747-1809). Some

intellectuals

and educators: Margaret Collier

are (fl.

Talbot

daugh— 1 73 5

Hannah More (1745-1833). Some are daughters of merchants and shopkeepers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Eliza 1757) and

Haywood

(1693?- 1756). And still others are daughters of landowners: Sarah Fyge Egerton (1669-1722), and Charlotte Smith

Preface

(1749-1806).

Some come from

Anna

lectual or religious dissent:

Mary

Wollstonecraft

families with a tradition Letitia

(1759-1797),

[xvii]

of intel-

Barbauld (1743-1825),

Mary Hays (1760-1843),

Lucy Aikin (1781-1864), and Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Others,

such as Jane

Adams

Mary Robinson and

(1710-1765), died

in the

poorhouse;

Charlotte Smith spent time in debtors’

Some, such as Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan; 1783?- 1859), were quite famous; others were nearly anonymous: Mary Wray, Caroline Symmons, Lucy Hutton, and Eliza Bradburn. The lives of a few were marred by scandal: Eliza Haywood, an actress, left her husband without his consent and allegedly was mistress to many men and mother of two illegitimate children; and for a year, Mary Robinson was mistress to the Prince of Wales. More had lives touched by disaster: Charlotte Smith entered into a miserable marriage with Benjamin Smith; Priscilla Poynton (1750-1801) was blind by the age of twelve; and Phillis Wheatley (1753?- 1784), a black poet, was taken to America, went to England, then when her prison.

mistress

fell

Some of

ill

returned to Boston.

these

women

such as

Mary O’Brien

(fl.

1790) were

were novelists. A few were bluestockings, and one was patronized by bluestockings. Even if self-educated, most were well educated; they knew their classics, and often classical languages, and, like both Elizabeth Bentley (1767-1839) and Susannah Blamire (1747-1794), knew their Milton. Like Ann Murry (fl. 1778-1799), many were poets; others, such as Jane Porter (1776-1850),

themselves educators, often with powerful literary connections. Often, too, they register decidedly different views on topics

where one might expect shared opinion. Mrs. Barbauld, for instance, would put some restraints on female education, whereas most others were advocates of female education. Anna Seward

many of these women wrote them. Poynton thought that, while Homer and Milton could

loathed conduct books, but Priscilla

women would have to find their most of these women sought inspira-

find inspiration in other authors,

inspiration in nature

— but

Smith accepted the intellectual inferiority of women and defined it in terms of Milton and Newton: “It is the fashion now to consider the abilities of women as betion in Milton. Elizabeth

Preface

[xviii]

men but there never was Newton .” However, most of these

ing on an equality with those of

among women a women, aspiring

Milton,

a

.

.

.

;

13

of Milton and disseminating the knowledge of Newton, were challenging patriarchal notions and simultaneously questioning whether Milton’s poetry really provided

to the learning

a sanction for

Predictably, these

on the

political

them.

women

spectrum

represent various shades of opinion

— from

Mary

Astell

and Jane West,

both supporters of the Church of England and Tory the essential independence of

Mary Ann

politics; to

Radcliffe; to the

avowed

Lucy Aikin, Catherine Macaulay, and Charlotte Smith; to the thinly veiled radicalism of Mary Hays and Mary Shelley. Some, such as Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft, were so blatant in their radicalism that they were accused of unsexing their sex and corrupting its morals. Even if Anna Barbauld and Elizabeth Smith balked at the notion of general education, both were highly and impressively educated. Like them, Hannah

liberalism of

More may have submitted to the values of patriarchal culture, but she nevertheless urged women’s education and the cultivation of female understanding. Mary Astell proposed establishing women’s colleges, and Ann Murry, Anna Seward, and Mary Wollstonecraft

were

all

avid supporters and powerful advocates of fe-

male education. With Catherine Talbot, many of these

women

bridled at the assumption of female inferiority; Catherine

Macau-

lay, ity

Charlotte Smith, and

Mary

of the sexes, and both Eliza

Wollstonecraft urged the equal-

Haywood

and Mary Walker used

arguments for sexual equality to advocate divorce. If Haywood thought the world was a perilous place for young women, Hays explained why: because women were everywhere being victimized by its moral conventions. And early on, Sarah Fyge Egerton expatiated on how women might free themselves from victimization: with a change of attitude and by refashioning their selfimage in the realization that, contrary to popular opinion, they are the superior sex. Unpredictably, perhaps, Milton

seems to

have held an important place within the zone of female con-

"Elizabeth Smith, Fragments

second editions both appeared

in

Prose and Verse (Boston, 1810), p. 68. First and

in 1808,

and another

in 1809.

Preface

many women

sciousness and to have elicited from

xix

[

|

shared

a

understanding. For the most part, that understanding achieves

com-

articulation not in formal essays but in critical asides, not in

mentaries on Milton but

in treatises

particularly sexual politics,

Not

proof-texts.

an

where Milton’s writings

but most of these

all

ally in their cause,

Lost turned the tables

on education and

women

are rifled for

regarded Milton

who

an advocate for the female,

on

politics,

patriarchal culture and

its

as

in Paradise

misogynistic

That their perception of Milton differs so markedly from that of present-day feminists opens the question of which group of feminists, yesterday’s or today’s, has been seduced by traditions.

patriarchal culture and

veying

its

attitudes

is,

while promoting

by perpetuating

its

its

traditions, pur-

readings

and

inter-

pretations.

What

is

said

of women writers currently

—

that

Milton

is

their

“bogie,” darkening the pages of everything they write; that Mil-

ton provokes jubilation

in

male (not female) writers who, unlike

male counterparts, groan to be delivered from the weight of patriarchal tradition cannot be said so easily of women writers their

—

before the Victorian period

whose relationship with Milton is and whose writings, if they register

ambiguous, not antithetical, uneasiness with the Milton Tradition, are dubious less of Milton than of certain ideological positions his poetry was being made to serve. Women were not usually intimidated, as was the blind Priscilla Poynton, into forgoing the visionary tradition of Milton for the inspiration

of nature

or,

submitting to the belief that there

was Elizabeth Smith, into never was and never could be a as

Milton among women. The dark age ceases with Chaucer, says Lady Mary Chudleigh, and under the aegis of Milton, who chases

away

world begins

the night and

all

to flood with light

its 14 .

resents herself as wishing for the is

phantoms and

And

if

the

specters,

Elizabeth Bentley rep-

expanded wings of Milton, she

represented in the preface to her poetical volume as already in

possession of them: “not the l4

last

or meanest in the train

Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To Mr. Dryden, on of

I7I3-

this

volume was published

in 1703; the

‘fol-

his Excellent Translation

Virgil,” in Poems on Several Occasions, 3d ed. (London, 17 22), p. 30. tion

who

The

first

of

edi-

second, in 1709 and reissued in

Preface

[xx]

low where seraphic Milton led .’” Mary O’Brien is another poet who, following in Milton’s train because “more perfect 15

truths

beam

forth in Milton’s song,” believes that Milton’s blind-

monuments

ness should not be figured in “his B).

lamps of light”

that “in higher regions

The following pages

altering alters

burn”

(see

Appendix

witness to the Blakean adage that the eye

all.

This book

down

to the poet, but instead

is

owing

to Sandra Gilbert first

— for

throwing

my interest — and second to Joan

the gauntlet and for firing

Malory Webber, who had she lived would doubtless have written something like it herself. This coupling of names is not meant to valorize the Gilbert-Webber controversy as one between feminist and nonfeminist or between a deconstructionist who destabilizes texts and an old historicist who stabilizes them by asserting meanings valid for all time 16 Gilbert and Webber each bring to .

Milton’s text

a

feminist consciousness that

is

natural, not ac-

quired, and read the text differently, the former attending to

Milton was read and the torically,

latter to

how

how

he ought to be read. His-

both these concerns have their genesis

in the writings

of

Milton’s female readership, and those concerns are usually inter-

Webber lock arms, but at one same territory, they cross swords:

twined. Occasionally Gilbert and crucial juncture, tracking the as Gilbert

invokes historical paradigms to authorize twentieth-

century readings of Milton, readings as

a

Webber

sanction for her

tions the validity of Gilbert’s

(also in search

own way

of historical

of reading Milton) ques-

paradigms

— or rather the

validity

of Gilbert’s representation of them. The crucial issue is not whether Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, but whether in doing so the

such

a tradition,

poem would

and further, whether

annihilate or advance

women

historically (that

is,

myth or intraditional myth of

before the twentieth century) were revising Milton’s stead following Milton’s lead in revising the origins.

'

Webber would

carve

a

niche for Milton in the very

liter-

’Elizabeth Bentley, Genuine Poetical Compositions on Various Subjects (Norwich,

A3, p. 68. "’Their controversy

1791), sig.

Literary Studies: 90.

An

is

misrepresented

Introduction

in this

way by

K. K. Ruthven, Feminist

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),

p.

Preface

ary history from which Gilbert

[xxi]

would exclude him, Gilbert arguParadise Lost “must have seemed

Webber, that even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illustrate the historical dispossession and degradation of the female prining, contrary to

ciple.”

17

Though,

like

Webber,

I

am

doubtful about

some of

premises and question certain of her conclusions,

I

Gilbert’s

remain deeply

indebted to her intelligence and snappy wit and, more,

am

exhila-

by the opportunities her special turn of the critical lens has opened tor Milton studies. Gilbert’s pioneering work stands behind this book although the real prodding to write it came first, and unwittingly, from Susanne Woods and then from Stuart Curran, Kenneth Gross, and especially John Shawcross, who presided over the Milton Institute (in 1985) at Arizona State University. Without them, this book simply would not be. Nor could it have been written without the sharp focusing of the issues involved in a feminist critique of Milton afforded by the East Coast Milton Seminar, particularly through the presentations of my colleague Wally Kerrigan, my adopted colleague Maureen Quilligan, my former student Jackie DiSalvo, and my friends (old and new, respectively) Joan Bennett and Mary Nyquist. Indeed, this book would never have been written at all without the released time made possible by the University of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Humanities time spent at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, the British Library, and the Fawcett Library of the City of London Polytechnic. Nor would it have been written as it is without the encouragement, but also hesitations, of my 1985 Milton seminar at the University of Maryland and those rich but all too infrequent am also indebted to conversations with Annabel Patterson. Richard Helgerson, Michael O’Connell, and Donald Pearce, who rated

—

I

provided the occasion,

as well as a

fit

audience, for airing these

ideas at the University of California, Santa Barbara; to Michael

Lieb, Stella Revard, and

one anonymous reader

who

provided

Cornell University Press with shrewd, perceptive, useful reports; to

two

learned, gracious,

’’Gilbert, “Patriarchal

reliable friends,

Poetry and

Women

Readers,”

Deirdre David and

p.

374.

— Preface

[xxii]

Tom

who

Oveis,

showed me

the

read the manuscript in penultimate draft and

way

to an ultimate one; to three colleagues

Richard Brecht, Marie Davidson, and Brit Kirwin ing

author

its

a

way

— who, show-

out of another kind of dilemma, as only they

can appreciate, saved the book; and to

my

favorite typist, Noelle

Peggy Hoover. Any of the above, or all together, deserve the dedicatory page and would receive it, were it not for the overriding obligations I have to two very important women in my life, and two very important men. They have, singly and collectively, provided me with the

Jackson, and expert copyeditor,

idealisms

even

if

I

of them,

— personal and

am I

a

professional, private and public

slow learner

owe immense

I

To

that

each

gratitude, not forgetting that “a grateful

By owing owes not, dischargd.” No burden that. mind

shall forever aspire to realize.

—

/

but

still

pays, at once

/

Indebted and

Joseph Wittreich Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A

Note on Citations

All citations given parenthetically within the text are (for poetry)

from The Works ofJohn

by Frank Allen Patterson et al. (18 vols.; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931-38), and (for prose) from Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. (8 vols.; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953-82). Milton, edited

[xxiii]

FEMINIST MILTON

— :

Chapter

i

Critiquing the Feminist Critique Feminist criticism cannot become simply bourgeois criticism in drag.

It

must be

ideological and moral criticism;

it

must be

revolutionary.

— Cora Kaplan The theory

is

more impressive than some of its

practices.

— K. K. Ruthven

the aftermath of his announced “dislodgment,”

In

name

1

Milton’s

continues to turn up unexpectedly: in the poetry of Allen

Ginsberg and the novels of Margaret Drabble; phies of both

Malcolm

X

in the

autobiogra-

and Frank Reynolds, former secretary

on the crisis in Iran and in the New York Times' account of Anita Bryant’s divorce trial; in the reflections of Shirley MacLaine in Out on a Limb', and most recently in Bill Moyers’ remarks on the venality of White House rhetoric but also in a well-publicized commendatory citation written by a superior officer for J. D. Hicks, gay cop of San Francisco. It is startling to find Milton as a presence here, only because the rift between the popular culture and the academic culture has become so huge and because through a curious turn in sexual politics, an act of male appropriaParadise Lost is no longer thought to be a poem in which tion Milton curries favor with women. This is instead a text with which women enter into a Fiercely adversarial relationship; it is a target on which they can heap their frustrations and often rage. If to the Hell’s Angels; in the Washington Post's editorializing

—

—

'F.

R. Leavis writes, “Milton’s dislodgment, in the past decade, after

.

.

.

cen-

of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss” ( Revaluation Tradition and Development in English Poetry [London: Chatto and Windus, 1 93 61

turies

,

p. 42).

[]

Feminist Milton

[i\

we

can glimpse our

own

historical

moment through

Review demonstration of sexual difference

new

a Saturday

— “He begins with the

Miltonic poem, and finds she has never looked into

even into Milton, for that matter) In the eighteenth century,

— our moment

when

there

is

”2 it

(or

an aberration.

was perhaps

a

deeper

gulf between the sexes but not nearly so great a distance between the popular culture and the intellectual

strong presence in both cultures, but

elite,

it

name was a name revered

Milton’s

was

also a

by women. We hear of him in accounts of Ann Bristol milkmaid who knew little poetry but knew

particularly

Yearsley, a

Paradise Lost inordinately well,

and

in stories

of the twelve-year-

Symmons, who seems to have been especially enamored of the same poem One representative woman of the age writes: ‘“The mind is its own place,’ says the great Milton; the mind is its own place, says the little Elizabeth Montagu.” Yet Montagu’s intent is not so much to align herself with Satan as to old Caroline

3

.

suggest that Satan

is a

Prometheus, that the plight of women

re-

Promethean patience and endurance. Not all, but certainly some, of these women share in Montagu’s sentiment that “old virginityship is Milton’s hell, ‘where hope ne’er comes that comes to all’” and share too in her resolve “‘to quires of them a

.

.

.

—

gather the rose of love while yet

Mary

Wollstonecraft

dire consequences.

is

’tis

said to

Only when

time .’” 4

have done just

she

is

in the throes

that,

but with

of passion for

’Quoted by Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1966), p. 215.

‘Upon writing

book (see. p. vi), C. P. instance perhaps would'prove but little; but have

the passage used as an epigraph to this

Moritz admits, “This single conversed with several people of the lower class, who all know their national authors, and who all have read many if not all of them. This elevates the lower ranks, and brings them nearer to the higher. There is hardly any argument, or I

dispute in conversation, in the higher ranks, about which the lower cannot also converse or give their opinion” (Travels of Carl Philipp Moritz in England in 1782,

Matheson [London: Humphrey Milford, 1924], pp. 43-44). On the accomplishments of Yearsley and Symmons, see Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1922), pp. 24-25. 4 See Elizabeth Montagu, Mrs. Montagu “Queen of the Blues”: Her Letters and Eriendships from 1762 to 1800, ed. Reginald Blunt (2 vols.; London: Constable, 1923), II, 43, 12; cf. Hannah More, Christian Morals, in The Works of Hannah More (11 vols.; London, 1830), IX, 229. See also The Letters of Elizabeth Montagu, ed. Matthew Montagu, 3d ed. (4 vols.; London, 1810-13), I, 299. ed. P. E.

1

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

Henry

Fuseli

is

[3]

she able to redeem Milton, and then only by sur-

rendering her feminist ideology and ceasing to attack Milton as cultural authority.

Otherwise and

Poovey, Milton’s Eve

is

earlier,

according to

women

Mary

regarded by Wollstonecraft as “one of

masculine stereotypes of female nature”

the

a

sought their identity and

still

in

which some

others found their female

nature grossly distorted, indeed subjugated. Wollstonecraft, this

argument goes, discovers in Milton’s Eve a “commentary not on women but on men from whose imagination she sprang from Milton’s Adam and, before him, from Milton himself.” 5 Her strategy is therefore to quote Milton against himself by turning Eve’s words back upon the poet. What is concealed by such an argument is Wollstonecraft’s own recognition, which is not very different from Christopher Hill’s, that “Milton’s attitude to Eve

—

as full

is

eral.”

who

6

is

of paradoxes

Another turn of the not faithless to

towards

as his attitude

a

women

critical lens reveals a

in

gen-

Wollstonecraft

feminist ideology, but faithful to a text

torn by ideological contradictions that do not do irreparable

dam-

age and are evidence of Milton’s subversion of stereotypical representations of

Eve and of women

generally, a Wollstonecraft

determined to represent Milton’s text ambiguities.

No

less

in all its

paradoxes and

than those of his early female readership,

Milton’s writings participate in ideology without being ruthlessly

determined by

it,

and

as

keenly as this readership, Milton seems

have been sensitive to the ideological tensions inherent

to

calculated contradictions and to have implanted for instructive purposes.

It is

poem about

early nineteenth centuries a ity

only right that

them

in his

in his texts

in the eighteenth

and

the education of human-

should be turned to that end.

However detached Milton may have become from our "’Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the

Works of Mary

Wollstonecraft,

Mary

Woman

Shelley, and

present

Writer: Ideology as Style in the

Jane Austen (Chicago: Univ. of

Chicago Press, 1984 ), pp. xii, 72 82 At the turn into the nineteenth century, Fuseli was regarded as “the only true translator this poet has ever possessed” and is celebrated as doing for Milton what Michelangelo did for the Bible, that is, providing a commentary on “terrible and gigantic forms” and giving “an habitation and a shape to his ideal forms” (see William Seward, Biographiana [London, ,

.

1799], PP- 505, 506 ). 6

See Christopher Hill’s Milton and

Faber, 1977), P- 376

.

the English Revolution

(London: Faber and

Feminist Milton

[4]

educational system, he was securely attached to time,

when

Paradise Lost

it

in

was recommended reading

an earlier for

young

children, a particularly important part of the educational system

women,

for

and, in America, a

book through which simultane-

women

were being taught submission and black women were being shown the way to liberation. Judging from 7 this poem the observation of the German critic C. P. Moritz was common fare for landladies (and tailors’ wives no less!), indeed for all women who saw themselves victimized by a maledominated society and who, finding their own situation mirrored in Satan’s, fastened their attention on his soliloquy in Book IV. Women seemed all too like Satan, who “bore about with him a 8 hell in his own bosom .” Yet it was not just Satan who analogized their condition there was also Eve. Thus the elderly Hannah More, to some “appearing a patroness of vice” and therefore deciding to dismiss her servants and leave her home, relates her situation to Eve’s. As she was helped into her carriage, she is reported to have “cast one pensive parting look upon her bower, saying, ‘I am driven like Eve out of Paradise; but not, like Eve, by angels .’” 9 Among these women a shared recognition of the advantages in knowing history was coupled with the realization that for women to know their history was for them to know their Milton. Women, no less than men, were engaged by Milton, especially in times of fierce strife when freedom was being crushed beneath the despot’s sway and when a tempest of evil days was seen blackening the English nation Indeed, women were especially engaged, for they found in Paradise Lost, with its urgent sexual and social awareness, an acculturating narrative a forging ground for their own ideal of educated and responsible womanhood, an ideal then founded upon sexual equality rather than, as today, upon sexual difference. ously white

,

—

111

.

—

7

See

n. 3,

above.

“Sec Jane West, Letters Addressed

333

to a

Young

Man

(3 vols.;

London,

1801),

III,

-

,y

Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More ed. William Roberts (4 vols.; London, 1834), IV, 317. ,

,0

See

Anna

Laetitia Barbauld’s

dred and Eleven,” ings

Memoirs,

“On

the

Use of History” and “Eighteen Hun-

and a Selection from the Poems and Prose Writof Anna Laetitia Barhauld, ed. Grace A. Ellis (2 vols.; Boston, 1874), II, 1 17,

124, 400, 437.

in

Letters,

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

The

place of Paradise Lost in the popular culture, and especially

allure for

its

[5]

women,

of reading and of interpretation,

poem

on the history on what was allowably said of

affords a valuable perspective

was sometimes the case particularly in the eighteenth century, on what was being sidestepped or silenced. Parthis

or, as

ticularly in

which

women’s paradigmatic responses

to Paradise Lost

are not always the same, and in the responses

provoked,

we

find a

ground on which

to follow, as

women

,

then

Hans Robert

Jauss might say, the footprints of the poem’s immediate reception."

The horizon of expectations

created largely by Milton's tions

of

altered,

it

in his

own

that greeted Paradise Lost

political

was

posture and manifesta-

prose writings; but such expectations were also

even corrected, thereby steering reception, determining

interpretation, but paradoxically delaying understanding of the

poem. Furthermore,

was

there

at the

very outset an effort to

anathematize as misleading and incompetent any interpretations that

were

heretical or

simply unorthodox. There was also an

ef-

between expectations of Paradise Lost and Milton’s supposed achievement. This was done through a maneuver that, first, disengages the poem from the context of Milton’s prose writings with which it enjoys an elaborate and meaningful intertextuality and that, then, realigns this poem with the literary and generally conservative tradition of epic. We see this situation best in the respective comments of Andrew Marvell and Theodore Haak, where Marvell, in his dedicatory verses on Paradise Lost empties Milton’s poem of the same fort to create distance

,

subversive political content that

The

Haak

credits

history of the reception of Paradise Lost

ceted and multilayered, the meanings

is

it

with holding.

especially multifa-

embedded

therein

coming

available in successive unfoldings through a slow and halting pro-

which newly articulated experiences of the poem, especially by women, are raised to consciousness, producing a “grad12 ual and belated understanding.” In the case of Paradise Lost, the cess in

"See Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 143; see also pp. 17071, but see as well the remarks of Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), p. 160. 12

Jauss,

Toward an

Aesthetic of Reception, p. 25.

Feminist Milton

[6]

reception

first

is

not the only, and perhaps not the most impor-

The poem’s later reception, especially during the Romantic period, is more than a distorted echo of its initial recep-

tant, reception.

tion,

and something other than simply

of newly emer-

a reflex

gent myths and experience.

At

a

time

when women

“how

beauti-

theirs has “described the

bower

are keenly sensitive to

fully” this “favorite poet”

of

of Eve” and ornamented her and Adam’s paradise, and are su-

premely aware

Adam

asks his

that,

whatever he

Maker

for an equal,

cendancy. Especially the poets

is

thought to have received,

women

among

writers are

those

women

on the

as-

writers can

claim William Hayley as their prophet and sponsor, citing a passage from

An

Essay on Epic Poetry

unjaundic’d eyes,

— even

(as

was

female writer will

Catherine Talbot, as “the

first

claim, as does

Anna Barbauld

ing,” that “the

same graces

with

Her

and echoes of Milton, para-

allusions to

phrases, and quotations

— the

Britain,

Will glory to behold such rivals rise.” 13

/

works strewn with plagiarisms

“The bards of

:

said

now

of Charlotte Smith) count Milton, with

of English poets” and thereupon in her essay

o’re her

“On

pen preside

Lady’s Writ-

a

/

That form her

14

manners and her footsteps guide.” As Smith observes, only by “fancying [themselves] like the wandering Lady in Comus” can female writers “indulge all sorts of romantic visions,” although “ these writers may also be caught wondering whether ’Tis Comus himself. or some friendly shepherd coming to protect us wandering virgins from the arch imposter, and give us ‘Some .

.

.

.

.

13

Charlotte Smith, Minor Morals (Dublin, 1800), pp. 29, 35; Anna Seward, Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (6 vols.; Edinburgh, 1 8 1 1 ), I, 18; VI, 342. The Examiner (778 [22 December 1822], 804) similarly praises first

as a

Milton’s “beautiful description of the connubial happiness of our

The strong, not weak, parents,” and

Literary Chronicle (103 [1821], 284) portrays Milton’s

character. William

decrees against

women

assume the

of protagonist

Hayley believes

writing poetry; indeed, he thinks

it is it

is

Eve

time to cancel all time for them to

For the passage quoted, see An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), ed. Sister M. Celeste Williamson (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), p. 75 (“Epistle IV,” 11 100- 101). role

in epic poetry.

.

H Talbot’s

ence

judgment

Mary Anna

in Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) is cited

by Flor-

Hilbish, Charlotte Smith: Poet and Novelist (Philadelphia: Univ.

of Pennsylvania Press, 1941), p. 488; see also The Works of Anna With a Memoir (2 vols.; London, 1825), I, 59.

Laetitia Barbauld:

— Critiquing the Feminist Critique

[7]

dungeon of innumerous boughs .’” 15 One woman writer of the Romantic era even converts Milton’s supposed description of the inequality of the sexes into a topos cheering

little

/

In this close

for father-son relationships:

From

infancy to manhood, he had but one impression of his father,

that

“In his port divine

The image of his

glorious

Maker shone.

Truth, wisdom, rectitude severe and pure!”

And

almost worshipping the

“For

He

only

—

idol in his heart, as

his son, for

God

in

formed

—

him!”

loved and honored him without measure. 16

within the context of

It is

tory

God

human

— which

sees

a revisionary

view of

literary his-

Milton’s early female readership rising up

against the patriarchal tradition of Scripture and sees Milton self as an ally in, not antagonist to,

such an enterprise

—

him-

that

we

should situate the entire feminist debate that has come to center in Milton, including the important and pertinent

article

Lewalski with the seeming impertinence harbored sentence: “It

was bound

analysis of Milton

and

to

happen sooner or

women .”

17

later

by Barbara in its initial

—

a

feminist

This declaration allows

for,

indeed invites, the inference that the so-called feminist issues

now

being focused on by literary criticism are anachronistic, superim-

posed on

poem

which they

germane.

may

imply that no historically valid sexual difference can be observed within Milton’s readership. In this declaration, moreover, Lewalski hints at what seems to be the only opinion shared by those whose concern (like her own) is with how to read Milton and those (such as Sandra Gilbert) whose concern is with how Milton

came

a

to

are not

It

also

to be read.

15

Smith, Minor Morals, pp. 180, 181. Jane Porter, The Pastor’s Fireside: A Novel (4 vols.; London, 1817), III, 391. l7 Barbara Lewalski, “Milton on Women Yet Once More,” Milton Studies, 6

16

—

(

1974 ), 4

-

Feminist Milton

[8]

Lewalski accepts

this

bifurcation of the critical enterprise,

which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar define and which followers have deepened.

1

”

For both camps, feminist

aspect of a belated understanding of Paradise Lost

,

their

may

issues, an

be relevant

emergent readings, but certainly not to historically determinate readings of Milton’s poetry, and critical efforts that might easily be integrated are held by both sides in segregation. This segregation has in turn fostered exclusionary tactics. Those who to

engaging feminist issues often align themselves

are Miltonists

of Christian humanism, while those who are feminists venturing supposedly new readings of Milton’s powith the

etry

tired cliches

mount

their antipatriarchal interpretations

upon

the patri-

archal criticism (theoretical, literary, and historical) of Harold

Bloom, Stanley the question of criticism

Fish,

what

wherein

and Lawrence Stone. Such

alliances raise

are appropriate interlockings for a feminist

women

are so often figured if not as slaves then

Does Freud or Marx furnish the apt paradigms? Are those paradigms to be drawn from a selfidealized academic male reader or from a historical female readership from history written from a male or female perspective? as

members of a colonized

sex.

—

Milton’s male readership, in contrast with his female readership

of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has fostered the notion to which today’s feminists typically, but not unilaterally, subscribe: that Milton and his characters “constitute the misogynistic essence

of

.

.

.

‘patriarchal poetry.

”’ lv

They have

fostered

such a notion by hiding Milton’s sexual politics and thereby evading discussion of it.

IK

See, e.g., Sandra Gilbert

Woman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary

London: Yale Univ. Iv

and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman

The Imagination (New Haven and in the Attic:

Press, 1979), p. 668.

tamer view registered by Joan E. Hartman, “We Ribs Crooked by Nature: Gender and Teaching Paradise Lost," in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s “ Paradise Lost,” ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1986): “Feminist scrutiny shows the epic to be a remarkable representation of the enduring elements of patriarchy” (p. 134). It is odd that neither side in the debate neither those who allegedly submit to Milton’s vision nor those who, arguably, submit to a patriarchal version of what Milton’s vision is said to be engages the two essays that by anyone’s standards are mediatorial of the crucial issues and at once judicious, even conciliatory, in their handling of both sides of what is fast becoming a hot dispute. It may or may not be relevant that the authors of both essays arc men: Jean Hagstrum lbid., p.

180. See also the

—

—

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

Miltonists and feminists alike,

it

[9]

appears, have been led to be-

lieve that historical criticism has already

done

its

job. But the job

has hardly yet begun and can only be accomplished in the realization that

we

we will approach

an understanding of Paradise Lost

begin to address the various questions for which

this

when poem

provides an array of confusing and seemingly contradictory answers. Like the Bible, which exhibits, as Robert Alter remarks, “a restless dialectic cates

movement of

signification”

through “a rhetoric of entrapment,”

20

and communi-

Paradise Lost intro-

duces disharmonies beneath an apparently harmonious surface order to transport conventional propositions about

zone of

a

new and

(to

women

in

into

the orthodox) unsettling perceptions.

Miltonists have fostered and feminists have acquiesced in the supposition that Paradise Lost its

is

simply an emanation of the

spirit

of

from “the non-contemMilton’s poems, on the

age, a supposition that has shielded us

poraneity of the contemporaneous.”

21

one hand, are resistant to the flattening simplifications of the historical humanists and, on the other hand,- are in the vanguard of the very endeavor a feminist criticism would promote. What is at issue here is not the presence of a conservative or revolutionary (“Milton and the Ideal of Heterosexual Friendship,” in Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980]), and David Aers and Bob Hodge (‘“Rational Burning’: Milton on Sex and Marriage,” in Literature, Language, and Society in England,

1

$80- 1680 [Dublin:

Gill

and Macmillan; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981]). To these titles should be added the recent pieces by Philip J. Gallagher (“Creation in Genesis and in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, 20 [1984], 163-204 [see esp. pp. 179-95]), Douglas Anderson (“Unfallen Marriage and the Fallen Imagination in Paradise Lost,” Studies in English Literature, 1 soo- 1900, 26 [1986], 125-44), and William Shullenberger, “Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism,” Milton Quarterly, 20 (1986), 69-84. What is indisputably and pointedly relevant about all these essays is that, without slurring over what is conventional and crabbed in Milton’s thinking, their accents fall on a Milton who is “a radical and seminal revisionist” (see Hagstrum in Sex and Sensibility, p. 29). These critics together formulate a critique of both the feminist and humanist appropriations of Milton, of “the ideological mists” (see Aers and Hodge in Literature, Language, and Society in England, p. 123) with which both sides are clouding his poetry. Moreover, they alert us to the paradox in which Milton criticism is now lodged: historicism, with the aid of feminism, is actively negating the historicity of both Milton’s poetry and the criticism that has accrued to it. ^Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 144, 202. 21

SeeJauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception,

p. 36.

Feminist Milton

[io]

ideology, but the complex functioning of both within Milton’s

poems. In those poems, one must be aware of the assumptions Milton is representing and realize that the representation of this or that idea does not necessarily signify lack of resistance to

last

it.

Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,

and Samson Agonistes do not

deepen and extend, but rather decry and explode, the biblically sanctioned and culturally reinforced traditions of patriarchy and

misogyny. These are poems that emerge when liberated and liberating attitudes toward women are being driven from the stage of history. “With the possible exception of the middle years of the century,” Roger Thompson reports, “there seems little doubt that the Stuart era was one of the bleaker ones for women,

from the golden age of Renaissance flowering under the Tudors .” 22 It is no less true, however, that between certainly a decline

the time Milton’s last tury,

poems

much “of good omen

are published for

women”

was

gun .” 23

women

happened, so that “by

movement which

the end of the Restoration period the last

and the end of the cenat

long

freedom and independence had beReflecting upon the final years of the seventeenth cento carry

tury, Doris

to

Mary Stenton

movement

can therefore speak of “the

of opinion against the subjection of

women” and

“in

[their]

favour .” 24 Others, as

we

strument of such change,

and sponsors

can properly point to Milton as an in-

shall see,

as

one

their education.

who

credits

They can

ardent opponent of the majority,

who

women’s

single out Milton as an

objected to

women

ing in church, of the characteristically misogynist

marriage and one wife

women alities.

— of the

to cultivate the graces

Milton’s Eve values

is

call

speakfor one

Puritan tendency to encourage

of life while evading

work over

rather tend her garden than take tea.

course, she

rationality

its

harsher re-

idle speculation; she

would

through Raphael’s disexposed to the harsh world of civil war in the alleStill,

Roger Thompson, Women in Stuart England and America: A Comparative Study (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 1. 2, Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 203. JJ

24

Ibid., pp. 205, 215.

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

1 [

1

]

from Adam all that he learns from Michael about the misery, fever, and fret of human history. She is destined to live with Adam in that world. Adam may be privy to Michael's prophecy, but Eve learns of its lineaments through dream and also utters a prophecy, in her final speech of the poem, in accordance with the proclamation that the spirit of the Lord will come upon his people. His sons and daughters alike will prophesy, an indication of the equality of sexes that the Quakers of Milton’s time were fond of promoting. Mounting evidence makes it impossible to maintain without hesitation the argument that “Milton denounces and belittles women simulta-

gory of the War

neously.

in

Heaven and

will learn

” 25

For some, Milton seems to have given

rise to

the learned lady ,’’ 26 but for others, especially literary historians like

Adam's

sin

modern

Katharine Rogers, the Milton

and “aggravates Eve’s”

is

new

“the

emphatically

of

feminist

who a

cult

“gilds”

spokesman

misogyny” he found in Christianity, as well as in his own culture. He thus makes certain of his characters Satan and Adam in Paradise Lost, Samson and the Chorus in Samspokespersons for those same views, which correson Agonistes spond with his own opinions and which accentuate rather than mollify “the misogyny that he found in his own culture .” 27 What indeed, the modern feminists’ emermight be called Rogers’ gent understanding of Milton’s attitude toward women does not match well with the historically determinate view that most women, for a full century and more after Milton’s death, held concerning Milton’s views on women. Rogers is right to urge “We must distinguish between cultural and individual attitudes,” for the “patriarchal

—

—

—

and right too

—

in insisting that literary texts, especially, contain

“modifying factors” that militate against the misogyny they represent, even as such texts exhibit variously “slight and temporary hostility” toward women and sometimes, as is the case with “See Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, p. 158. “The phrase is Stenton’s ( The English Woman in History, p. 264). 27 See Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate, p. 144. The carefully marshaled arguments of Stevie Davies effectively erode the proposition that “Milton seems richly to deserve the title of ‘misogynist’ conferred on him by tradition” ( The Feminine Redeemed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton [Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986], p. 181). Cf. Rogers, pp. 158- 59.

[

1

Feminist Milton

2]

Milton, she thinks,

which

strategies,

for

misogyny.

a “full-fledged

Rogers are inoperative

”2

*

It is

just these

in Milton’s poetry,

poems with deploy-

that an earlier female readership credited his ing.

With the

facts

of history

perceive the matter of

how

their poet

was read

hand, Miltonists should learn to

to read their poet

as interrelated,

and the matter of

mutually illuminating

feminists, for their part,

might learn the many and

paradigms of female response

to Paradise Lost (there are

And

questions. principal

how

in

more than the two delineated by Gilbert and Gubar), even as they come to acknowledge that men themselves, including seventeenth-century men, are sensitive to the fact that in speaking of

women

winks ,” 29 to which a feminist criticism is now giving long-overdue attention. The perspective of both Miltonists and feminists on critical history needs to be lengthened, and on the so-called feminist issues it

they have “their

little

signs, their political

needs to be enlarged to take into account that some

— not drones adversarial

for the establishment but politically

women

like

Hannah

simply enraged by Milton, instead

Mitchell

engaged and

— rather

jump up

women

than being

in a rage

when

they

hear Milton quoted against them. It

has been too easy for both sides to join in the quip “If Milton

had a grudge against women, it was and thereupon to argue that Milton

common .” 30

a

grudge universally shared”

is

writing “according to the

seventeenth-century beliefs about

women

and mar-

argument also misses the fullness of Milton’s prelapsarian vision and misses altogether the finely nuanced critique of misogyny cradled within the text of Paradise Lost, as well as the ideological load of its last books. It may be that the record of history contains more, and other, images of Milton deriving from women than has hitherto been supposed, and that (Chrisriage

Yet

this

tine Froula’s protestations to the side)

such

a history

opens cur-

The Troublesome Helpmate, pp. xi-xii, 268. Rogers does insist, however, “that Milton’s view of marriage, and therefore of women, was much higher than those of many of his contemporaries” (p. 153). w See William Walsh, A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex (London, 1691), p. 105. ^See F. Peczenik’s comment on the quip by C. A. Patrides in “Fit Help: The Egalitarian Marriage in Paradise Lost," Mosaic, 27 (1984), 29. 2ti

Rogers,

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

[13]

rent feminist criticism to the very charge Froula protests: that

another repetition,

of

critical

its

if

not of Milton’s

history,

that

it

poem

certainly

recapitulates a

it is

of one aspect

male-dominated,

estabishmentarian phase of criticism which regards Milton as

a

representative, resolutely conventional poet and as a spokesper-

son for the

class prejudices

Paradise Lost

is

the supposed cipher. 31

may

Milton’s Eve

one her.

critic 32

and cultural commonplaces of which

fit

the outline of the Puritan housewife, but

astutely observes that the outline does not contain

Indeed, Milton’s representation of

Eve

is

so finely particu-

so filled with complexity and contradiction, that any

larized,

male or female, seems obliged to accept as a leading premise for criticism the contention that Milton speaks differently at reader,

different times, even sible to

render his

on the same

comments

point, that

it is

therefore impos-

consistent, yet also very possible to

from them, as did Wollstonecraft, that for Milton a woman 33 In an age, and especially a time, when is not “a mere satellite.” the world seemed to require “a legion of Wollstonecrafts to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence,” 34 among the English poets Milton came to be regarded as a female advocate intent upon improving the lot of women. Once exposed, the infer

contradictions in Milton’s text, their subversive thrust, had to be

acknowledged even

if

they were explained differently by differ-

ent readerships.

For

31

a

male readership,

as

represented by John Aikin, such con-

See Christine Froula, “Pechter’s Specter: Milton’s Bogey Writ Small; or,

Why

He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 172. Similarly, Roger Thompson Women in Stuart England and America, p. 173) contends that Is

(

Milton 32

is a

patriarch, just another

“man” of his

times.

See the fine essay by Shullenberger, “Wrestling with the Angel,”

p.

73, as

book by Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), where McColley attempts “to extricate Eve from a reductive critical tradition, as Milton sought to redeem her from a reductive litwell as the important

erary and iconographic tradition, and to establish a regenerative reading of her role” (p. 4).

The phrase is Mary Wollstonecraft’s; Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the 33

see Ulrich H. Hardt’s Critical Edition of

Rights of

Woman”: With

Strictures on

Po-

and Moral Subjects (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982), p. 56. M Mary Robinson, Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799), p. 2. This work is usually attributed to litical

Robinson.

Feminist Milton

[14]

tradictions

were evidence of defective

Milton inadvertently deconstructs

his

artistry;

through them

own argument,

as

when by

making Satan

the “real hero” of Paradise Lost he engages “the high

passions

commencement of the poem condemn” and then centers in

it is

at

meant

tle “full

favour of the cause

the

in

to

his

poem

an epic bat-

of inconsistencies” and inexplicable because of them

35 .

For Milton’s female readership, on the other hand, those contradictions and inconsistencies are deftly planted so as to erode the

orthodoxies the

poem

is

thought to espouse. The very orthodox-

one readership would impose upon Milton’s poetry are in the eighthose from which another readership would free it teenth and early nineteenth centuries, if not now. Even now, however, the understanding of Milton’s early female readership lingers in the realization that Milton moves against Renaissance traditions, iconographic and literary, by centering Paradise Lost in the prelapsarian lives of Adam and Eve and by then surrounding Eve with “patterns of prolepses of regeneration,” making of her an “exemplary, rather than merely cautionary” figure 36 From today’s vantage point, it may seem that the feminist debate (and any book concerned with it) should feature Comus, the title by which A Masque was known to the eighteenth century, and popularly known through its stage adaptations. But the poem gets short shrift in the following pages, which remain faithful to the historical record and therefore, perhaps unexpectedly, give special attention to Samson Agonistes, the text by which a male readership reclaimed Milton as a masculinist, patriarchal poet, after a female readership had for a time laid claim to

ies that

—

.

Paradise Lost as a

woman’s book. The

that has centered in

feminist debate of today

and circled around Paradise Lost

rests

on

as-

sumptions and evinces certain features that come under close examination in subsequent chapters. If modern-day feminists have accepted the tamed Milton of

know

critical

orthodoxy,

we had

better

—

from whence that orthodoxy derives how, why, and by whom it was established, under what pressures, and to what end. And if these same readers and critics have misleadingly first

35

See Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin (Philadelphia, 1824), p. 188. John Aikin’s introductory essay was first published in volume 1 of The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton (4 vols.; London, 1808).

^McColley, Milton’s Eve, pp.

13, 14.

Critiquing the Feminist Critique

turned ical

Mary

Shelley and Emily Bronte into representative histor-

paradigms, what can be said about their validity

discover in

[15]

women

when we

readers of the last half of the eighteenth cen-

tury another altogether different but widely shared pattern of re-

sponse to Paradise Lost ? Although Chapter

II

takes a short

Milton’s female readership, for the most part confining tion to

women

view of

its

atten-

readers of the last quarter of the eighteenth cen-

tury and, through them, to a view of Milton securely in place by the time Shelley and Bronte are writing, Chapter

III

enlarges the

compass. Once the currently accepted paradigms are questioned

and new ones are charted,

we must

ask

how

any of these para-

digms established themselves in the critical consciousness. The answer to this question requires a chronological survey of how feminist issues emerged in Milton criticism, of what the issues were, of who propounded them and in what contexts, of what twists and turns the feminist debate took as it moved through the eighteenth century, and of the alignments and realignments it fostered, or forced. At the end of the eighteenth century, though probably not at its beginning, it is possible for one woman poet to write:

If you’ll take a friend’s advice,

You

will not

What Milton

'7

Mary O’Brien, The

don,

178-5). P- 55

-

stumble writes.

Pious Incendiaries;

at

but swallow

37

or,

Fanaticism Display’d.

A

Poem (Lon-

Chapter 2

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes in

There

Eighteenth-Century Criticism

are tell-tale signs

of premature burial

all

over the canon.

—Joanna Russ Literary

works indubitably contain

only be labeled misogynistic.

certain features

What

in question

is

is

which can

why

they

are there.

— K. K. Ruthven Thomas Newton’s variorum

edition of Paradise Lost, dating

from the middle of the eighteenth century, contains some

telling

annotation that helps us sort out conflicting views of Milton

— pertaining

from the very beginning, as evidenced by Andrew Marvell and Theodore Haak still persist: either “the poem is orthodox in every part” or it deviates from orthodoxy, with Milton “combat[ing] supersition and tyranny of every form

which

—

and of every degree” and, with “a battering ram, beat[ing] before

all

him .” Newton 1

down

reports, but also resists, the then-pre-

vailing notion that “our poet, in this

work, seems

to court the fa-

vour of his female readers very much; yet cannot help thinking he intended a satirical, as well as a moral, hint to the ladies, in making one of Eve’s first thoughts, after her fatal lapse, to be, how to get the superiority and mastery over her husband.” NewI

.

.

.

ton attributes these sentiments to Robert Thyer, but they accord

very well with Newton’s

own

strategy for

showing those who

believed Milton was wavering from the patriarchy of biblical traTrapp articulates the former position, Richard Baron the latter; see Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, comp. Francis Blackburne (2 vols.; London, 1780), I, ‘Joseph

141, 145-

[l6|

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes dition that Milton

was

in fact

always “a strenuous advocate for

keeping up the authority of the husband.” 2 Indeed,

erywhere

insists

[17]

Newton

ev-

upon “Milton’s orthodoxy,” even with regard

of the Son, and always with regard to Milton’s

to the divinity

observing Christian tradition on the inequality of the sexes, on

woman’s subordination to man. In his apparent correlation of the three days of battle in Book VI with the Passion story in the Gospels, and in his apprehension that the battle in Heaven is itself an extended metaphor,

Newton may

be in advance of existing inter-

pretation, but these perceptions are only undergirdings for his

claim that Milton ton

would

partisan

relentlessly

.

in all his beliefs.

of the

New-

political

neutralize the praises due to Paradise Lost," but he

multaneously promotes the

idea, later

poem

si-

advanced by John Aikin,

matters social and political, this

that, scanting

theological

orthodox

lay to rest the notion that “the demerits

.

.

is

“is essentially a

”3 .

Milton’s thoughts are selectively

at

Newton’s

never the thought, expressed so forthrightly

and

fingertips,

in Tetrachordon, that

“the wiser should govern the lesser wise, whether male or fe-

Newton thinks Milton is saying that women are lowly by nature. And Newton’s chief evidence comes from Book male”

(11,589).

X, where with Eve wallowing in despair Adam is said to remain noble and high-minded. Give women an inch and they will take a mile, as Dalila does in Samson Agonistes (according to Newton). Here, it is remembered, Milton applies to women the term “hyena,” which

Otway had

previously applied to men. As for which

writer uses the term with greater justice, “let the criticks and the *

ladies determine,” says

Newton, who now once more

Thyer: “However just the observation Paradise Lost,

seems

may

to court the favour

returns to

be, that Milton, in his

of the female sex,

it

is

very certain, that he did not carry the same complaisance into

this

performance. What the Chorus here says, outgoes the very

bit-

terest satire

Newton

of Euripides,

himself chimes

who was

called the woman-hater."

Then

in:

Thomas Newton,

quoted in The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Henry John Todd (6 vols.; London, 1801), III, 203, 247; see also II, 205. 3 See Lucy Aikin, The Life of Addison (2 vols.; London, 1843!?]), h 39 and Memoir ofJohn Aikin (Philadelphia, 1824), p. 185. Cf. Hannah More, Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Princess, in The Works of Hannah More (11 vols.; London, 1830), VI, 325. ;

[

1

8]

Feminist Milton

These

reflections

.

.

are delivered

.

portant truths. But, by

some

by the Chorus

as serious

accounts, Milton himself had suffered

all

uneasiness through the temper and behaviour of

wonder

wives; and no

... he indulges his spleen a

the qualifications of the

men; and, into the

and im-

women, and

little,

two of

his

depreciates

asserts the superiority

to give these sentiments the greater weight, puts

of the

them

mouth of the Chorus. 4

Nor is it a wonder that, writing to Elizabeth Carter on Christmas Day 1749, Catherine Talbot will declare: “The new Milton is a pompous thing, without being ... a very fine one.” Here, un5

derstandably, female readers square off against the establishmentarian Milton,

who

supposedly was the author of a rigorously or-

thodox and assiduously theological poem. Their Paradise Lost, even among the more conservative like Hannah More, had “a due admixture of moral, ... of religious reference,” of politics (indeed sexual politics), history, and poetry. And when Milton “insinuates a political stroke in his great poem,” as More has one of her characters explain, it is always to generalize by way of opposing rigidly and often simplistic historical readings: Whatever had been written,

I

question,

his principles, or at

when

whatever period he had

he wanted to describe the overthrow of

authority by the rebel angels,

if

he would have illustrated

it

by

Cromwell’s seizing the mace, or the decapitation of Charles; much less, if he would have selected these two instances as the triumph of matter. 6

mind over

For Milton’s female readers, even Paradise Lost, as Elizabeth

Montagu might

“the doctrine of Christianity tianity.” 4

when

[is]

it

is

say,

most is

a

defended by the

theological,

poem wherein spirit

of Chris-

7

Quoted

in

The

Works ofJohn Milton, IV, 421, 437. Between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot

Poetical

'A Series of Letters To Which Are Added, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter

London,

to

.

Mrs. Vesey, 3rd ed.

.

.

(3

267-68. 1819), 'Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, ed. William Roberts (4 vols,; London, 1834), III, 320; and Ccelebs, in The Works of Hannah More vols.;

(11 vols.;

London,

I,

1830), VII, 64.

'The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth

London, 1800-1813),

hi, 279.

Montagu, 3rd ed., ed. Matthew Montagu

(4 vols.;

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

From Newton’s vantage thodoxies, whether he

is

point, Milton

notices that

Eve

forever asserting or-

writing about the divinity of the Son, or

the inequality of the sexes, although critics,

is

is

present for

Newton, unlike latter-day most of Raphael’s discourse

and comes off in the middle books of Paradise Lost ”s

Much

[19]

as “rather

too

Newton’s chagrin, however conventional Milton’s portrait of Eve may be it is not stereotypical. In short, Milton’s early commentators report, but balk at, the notion that Milton wavered from Greek tragic and Judeo-Christian traditions of misogyny. And even if they grudgingly concede that such may have been the case in Paradise Lost they find sufficient evidence in Samson Agonistes to clinch their argument that Milton was an orthodox, masculinist, and misogynistic poet. In philosophical.

to

,

other words, they turn to Milton’s rendering of a story that self,

as

Mieke Bal points

out, “highly ideological’’

ical” in its representation

of women, 9

a

is it-

and “stereotyp-

story that

when

retold

misogyny of the original in contrast to Milton’s rendering, which brings such elements into conflict with the customary image of Samson as a hero. Evading this aspect of Milton’s poem, early commentators identify Milton and Samson, the one with the other, and Milton’s attitude toward women is regarded as indistinguishable from that and

accentuates

typically

magnifies

the

of Milton’s

own

—

of the Chorus,

An Apology

for

in violation

Smectymnuus, that “the author

thesis, is

advanced

in

ever distinguisht

from the person he introduces” ( 880). William Blake was one of many, and in this of the same mind as many female readers of Paradise Lost, when in an annotation to Swedenborg’s Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell he declares: “Thus Fools quote Shake1

speare[.]

The Above

You might them

as

as well

is

Theseus’s opinion

to

Works ofJohn Milton,

11

Shakespeares[.]

&

give

’

concur with Dr. Thyer II,

Not

quote Satans blasphemies from Milton

Miltons Opinions.”

“Newton seems

,

in this observation; see

The

Poetical

372.

y

Mieke Bal, “The Rhetoric of Subjectivity,” Poetics Today, 5 (1984), 343. The ways in which the Samson story, as well as the Fall story, were used to reinforce patriarchy and misogyny are amply illustrated by Edward Ward, Female Policy Detected; or, The Arts of a Designing Woman Laid Open (London, 1761), pp. 65, 101, 121. 10

Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell," in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N. Y.: Dou“ Annotations to

Feminist Milton

[2o]

This premise for reading poetry caused tury interpreters, especially females, to last

poems counter

many

eighteenth-cen-

wonder whether Milton’s

rather than confirm male supremicist atti-

whether they invoke such commonplaces in order to scutor substantiate them. Even a male reader, such as Capel Lofft

tudes, tle

among

others, felt obliged to observe:

“The names

ot four Ladies

are in the List [of patrons for the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost]: Rebecca

Viscountess Brounckner Lady Henrietta Bond, Mrs. ;

Dive, and Mrs. Timperly

” .

Lofft continues:

“Of

this

Memorial,

from respect to the Individuals AND TO THE SEX, I confess it was not in my power to overpass the Notice.” By the end of the eighteenth century what is being noticed, owing to the insis11

tence of Milton’s female readership,

is

the ambiguity in Milton’s

representation of woman as well as the discrepancies between this portrait

and that one. Only one kind of woman, says William

Hayley, finds her prototype in Milton’s Satan, pecially in Paradise Regained,

who

archly misogynistic

with Milton, who, representing such

attitudes,

is

himself, es-

—

in contrast

also associates

them with one stage in human consciousness, an earlier time in history, and whose epics are “a striking proof [of] how ingeniously the great poet adopted the most opposite interpretations of Scripture,

they happened to suit his poetical purposes.” 12

as

Sometimes adopting “terms of indignation and reproach” (as in The History oj Britain), Hayley ’s Milton can be “uncandid and cruel,” but Milton, not always “misled,”

is

also capable

of candor

and charity, rising up against and overthrowing the misogyny of Saint Paul. 13

bleday, 1982), p. 601. In Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, Milton writes:

know who in the poem

“You

we

should consider not so much what the poet says, as says it. Various Figures, some good, some bad, some wise, some foolish, each speaking not the poet’s opinions but what is appropriate for each person” (IV, i, 439). should

.

.

.

that

"Capel Lofft, 77ie First and Second Books of “ Paradise Lost ” (Bury St. Edmond’s, 1793), P- I. 12 William Hayley, A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids (3 vols.; London, 1785), II, 10-11; see also I, 90; II, 7. H Ibid., II, 12, 140, 246. Hayley thus counters the view, advanced most recently by Dustin Griffin, that “Milton had made clear that the traditional Pauline injunctions the man should love and the woman should obey were still in force”; see Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 127.

—

—

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

[21]

Although women could now claim Lofft as a sympathizer and Hayley as an obvious ally, they still had to ward off a rear-guard action that sought to halt their critical enterprise. Feminist criti-

cism had achieved because

it

powerful ascendancy and widespread assent

its

had the authority of Milton’s text on

posed to

much commentary by

found

chief sanctions in

its

of

own, often

Newton and Thyer, its

retrograde, critical tra-

which runs

as least that

illustrates the

criticism turns against itself in the very

organized dogma, losing

op-

Milton’s male readership, which

male readership,

ditions. Indeed, Milton’s in the line

its

side, as

its

moment

proposition that that

turns into

it

capacity for probing and

unmasking

becomes self-aggrandizing rather than self-reflective. The annotations accompanying the often reprinted edition of Ray-

as

it

mond ical

&

de

St.

Maur

(1800),

purporting to be “Historical Philosoph-

Explanatory,’’ are an example.

serves, “It has that the First

been sarcastically

Initially, the

is

nocent, but highly natural and impressive.” folly

lets

after her creation,

looking-glass; but the circumstance here

Milton “makes the

poet

said, that the

woman, immediately

annotator obus

know

ran to a

not only perfectly in-

He

also concedes that

and impiety of Eve appear

less

extrava-

gant and monstrous in the eye of her posterity.”

Yet these notes, thus promising to be evenhanded and fairminded, prove otherwise, always buttressing the proposition 14 According to this that “Milton is generally truly orthodox.” annotator, he is orthodox in his description of Eve in her domestic employments: “Would that all her daughters had been equally but essential duties of house wifery.” He attentive to the retired is so in his representation of women as seeming to desire wealth, beauty, and flattery when what they really want is “sovereignty.”

—

To make

his case, the

annotator must

and Thyer and awkwardly credit

commit himself to Newton

their voices

over those in Mil-

poem. Thus he mitigates Raphael’s insistence that Eve was created for Adam’s love, not for subjection (VIII. 569-70), with

ton’s

the reminder that “in other parts of this 14

Milton’s Paradise Lost

.

.

.

poem Milton

with Historical,] Philosophical

&

(

says Bishop

Explanatory Notes

Newcastle upon Tyne, 1800), I, 170, 309; II, 371. The adapter of this French edition of Raymond de St. Maur into English prose is usually identified as George Smith Green, and this adaptation was frequently reprinted in the latter half of the eighteenth century: 1754, 1755, 1767, 1770, for example. (2 vols.;

Feminist Milton

[22]

Newton) seems to have been

strenuous advocate for keeping up

a

the authority of the husband.” Later he observes,

Milton leaves Eve behind to her retired character,

male mind could

ill

to be represented.”

marked with lent

.

.

self” 15

all this

“The

opinion,” says the annotator,

last

“is

Adam’s sorrow is “si“loud and hasty,” and if woman’s

is

which

woman

may

creation. This annotator

“in

is

him-

Newwoman and

thereby systematizing

support of its

own

that

one,

contradictions and enlisting

them

against

subversions, but he certainly

moves

the annotator

is,

Milton criticism

in

of God’s

as a sinister aspect

tradition

this

own

its

diminish

not forget that Milton’s text pits

character,

against

the fact. That

her husband, man’s

man and

exalt

like theirs, represent

rents in

fe-

gives credit to interpretations like those of

ton and Thyer,

in

suitable

bear the shocking scenes which were going

company of

in the

is

character

most

the greatest probability.” If

paradise

which,

XII] as

think

Mr. Thyer supposes that the

[but]

.

and thoughful,” Eve’s

—

Books XI and

[in

“Some

would

silence

against the strongest cur-

order to turn back the waves they are

making. His annotations would stem the

evade

critical tide,

its

quandaries, obliterate any traces of questioning, eliminating from

nuanced perception, thereby neutralizing its feminist consciousness, and thus eradicating both the facts and complexities of its critical history all of which strategies, there from the outset, are still too much a part of Milton studies. Paradise Lost

its

finely

—

From Lost,

the very beginning there

with

its field

of conflicting

but elusive system of subversion outlines Marvell dismissed and

was

the suspicion that Paradise

signals,

—

harbored an elaborate

a suspicion that in its

Haak

broadest

fostered. Together, Marvell

and Haak indicate the horizons of expectation

— and,

at least

the face of things, very different horizons of expectation

would confront next.

On

—

on

that

Paradise Lost both in Milton’s century

the one hand, Marvell

owns up

to

and the “misdoubting” Mil-

ton’s perhaps spiteful intentions in writing Paradise Lost, to liking

the project but fearing

its

success, lest Milton should perplex the

very things he would explain “and what was easy vain.” Yet

“now

See

ibid.,

I,

209;

II,

.

.

render

convinc’d” that Milton “hast not missed one

thought that could be ls

.

fit,

375, 397

/

(my

And

all

italics),

that

412 (my

wast improper dost

italics),

450, 510.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

omit,” Marvell also allows that he admits to making

his initial fears 16

surmise.

a false

Still,

[23)

were groundless;

Marvell’s suspicions

— especially Haak, who

about Paradise Lost were shared by others

reaches very different conclusions about Milton’s intentions in

From Haak, H. L. Benthem “gathered the impression that Milton’s poem was really about politics in Restoration England.” Benthem reports: “When Milton’s friends were writing Paradise Lost.

of the poem, they feared that it would be a lament for the loss of England’s happiness with the downfall of the revolutionary regime. But when they read it they saw that the prutold the

title

dent Milton had dealt only with the

of Adam; reassured, they

fall

withdrew their objections to publication. But (‘so far as understood from what Haak told me and what read myself’) although at first sight the epic’s subject was indeed the fall of our first parI

I

ents, in fact ‘this

very wily politician

.

.

.

concealed under this dis-

guise the sort of lament that his friends had originally sus’

pected.

” 17

In this juxtaposition,

emptying

it

is

Paradise Lost of

its

difficult

not to convict Marvell for

supposedly subversive religious and

political content, for representing a Paradise Lost

important cultural and even context in which this

poem

literary contexts.

shorn of its most

But restored

to the

originally appeared, as a headpiece to

companion

Samuel Barrow’s dedicatory poem, it is just as difficult not to read Marvell’s poem, together with Barrow’s, as a slick public-relations maneuver meant to help the poem circumvent prospective censors. It is difficult not to infer from the double-talk of these two poems, which asepic and sign Paradise Lost to very different generic categories prophecy that they mean to credit the poem with just those features of which they pretend to divest it; that they mean to say, if only by insinuation, that Paradise Lost is a poem of disclosure, discovery, revelation. In reading either dedicatory poem, we should not forget what Christopher Hill put back into our literary consciousness: after the Restoration “Milton was a marked man, forParadise Lost

and

as a

piece to

—

—

tunate to have escaped with his

life,”

owing

largely to the inter-

ior

Marvell’s poem, see The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2nd ed., ed. H. M. Margoliouth (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, 131-32. 17

tion

H.

L.

Benthem, quoted by Christopher

(New York: Viking

Press, 1977), pp.

Hill,

391-92.

Milton and the English Revolu-

Feminist Milton

[24]

of Marvell;

ventions

“censors

anything written by him.

.

.

opinions” into his

political

He

.

last

new

terfuge wherein radically

would

be

certainly

poems, except perhaps by

Patterson

would have

What we have

in

18

The

yield of such

.

.

.

poem

Annabel

who

is

an example of those disin-

entry codes to precisely the kind of

reading they protest against.” 2 " instance of friends,

as

Patterson explains, “are not to be

that, as

trusted,” for they “are

sub-

an “ideologically mobile” Milton."

it,

Marvell’s

genuous disclaimers

a

interpretations are forged out of

an ideologically complicated and not,

is

to

could not put his heresies or his

subtle reformulations of traditional materials. strategies

alert

We

apparently have here

a classic

are also poets, entering into collusion

with Milton in order to suppress existing expectations of him so that Paradise Lost can again be published.

expectations simply

lie

dormant

Never destroyed, those

until there

emerges

a

new

critical

consciousness that can accept in Milton’s poetry what in his

own

time seemed unacceptable or unspeakable. The enabling feature

of Milton’s poetry, making

it

susceptible to such disclosures (and

words but

none of her hesitations), is its “hermeneutic density,” allowing for “a vortex of possible or alternate meanings.” In juxtaposition with Barrow’s poem, which aligns Paradise Lost with epic tradition, is Marvell’s poem, aligning it with prophecy. Epic poems may want to stabilize their society, but prophecy is committed to changing it; epic poems here

I

use Patterson’s

register

21

may

typically confirm the reigning ideologies in a culture, but

prophecy probes those ideologies to their very foundations. Barrow’s poem, and Marvell’s, send out conflicting signals. Marvell sight”

(

1

is .

emphatic that

44;

my italics),

God

“rewards with Prophecie thy loss of

and Barrow

is

equally emphatic that

Ho-

must now yield to Milton in the province of epic. But then Barrow admits that Paradise Lost is a disclosure of

mer and

Virgil

“whatever

lies

hidden” and also concedes that here readers will

'“Christopher Hill, “Censorship and English Literature,” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill,

Volume

I:

Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century

England (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), p. 61. '^Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Condition of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 1

12.

^Ibid., p. 57. 21

Ibid., p. 156.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

—

find the “story of

all

In suggesting that

Milton centers

things”

and

first

his

poem

tory of a signals

more

on the

activity

in the story

of the

war

first civil

the his-

recent one. Implicit in these conflicting generic

— now the poem

is

a

prophecy,

now

attributing a secular,

lineage to a

literary

,

poem

—

comwith Barrow

an epic

peting invitations for contextualizing Paradise Lost

are

that Marvell

places squarely within religious, indeed biblical, tradition.

ever the

poem

is

if to

more encompassing than dogma

suggest that Paradise Lost

later

of

poems. 23

contexts that

is

own writings, Barrow’s poem severs

If

from discovery

to

a

to Milton’s

it

of

it

widening of context to Scripthe instance of Marvell’s poem, a con-

discovery. In the process, there ture and, especially in

is

strategies

allows, that in

indirection, a poetics of implication, will lead

tracting

How-

categorized, the signals of subversion appear to

be registered more strongly, as far

read-

a political

looking glass on contemporary history and mir-

though darkly,

roring,

]

in the celestial battle,

Barrow would also seem to center interpretive book that has always seemed most susceptible to ing, affording a

25

and present. 22

past

last,

1

would seem most

both prose works and Paradise Lost

relevant to

it,

from the

Marvell’s

poem

very slyly restores Paradise Lost to the contexts, intrinsic and extrinsic, that

most

fully reveal

From one vantage Paradise Lost

past

have

and voiding

a

its

it.

point, the generic categories used to define

distancing effect, drawing the

poem

into the

contemporaneity. But from another point of

poem

view, the scriptural books with which

this

identity have the effect of vaulting

into the present and as-

serting

its

contemporaneity.

And

it

this is true

establishes an

not only of Paradise

Lost but also of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.

The

books of Genesis, Judges, and Revelation, together with the Gospels and especially their wilderness story, were at once history and prophecy, narratives of what had occurred and of what now was recurring. They were books through which to glimpse the experience of England’s Civil

War

and, in the war’s aftermath,

For Barrow’s poem, see the new translation by Michael Lieb, “S.B.’s ‘In Paradisum Amissam’: Sublime Commentary,” Milton Quarterly, 19 (1985), 72. ^Many of these strategies are described by Hans Robert Jauss; see his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota 22

Press, 1982), pp. 4, 64, 175.

Feminist Milton

[26]

by which

to align individual

and national history. Humanity im-

24 paradised, “be-wildernessed,” imprisoned

told in a

by

Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,

way

that mirrors

through the

history of civilization in

War

ing the Civil

its

— these

are the tales

and Samson Agonistes, and

stories

of their protagonists the

current phase: God’s Englishmen dur-

years, the failure

of the Revolution, the millen-

nium that did not come and why it did not come. Not long after the publication of Paradise Lost, and perhaps owing to

its

seemed important to acquaint women value” and to “animate them to some higher

influence,

“with their

own

it

thoughts of themselves.” 25 Indeed, Milton’s

poem was

the

subversive thrust

often thought to extend

beyond

of

the ortho-

doxies of theology and Royalist politics to time-honored and

reli-

giously sanctioned social conventions as well. Censorship operates in curious

family, the role of the

—

upon just those areas the sexes that if they become unraveled sociopolitical fabric to fall apart. As

ways, imposing

itself

—

might cause the entire Thomas Ellwood remarked in 1675, with specific reference to Milton, this poet never took “the common Road,” Ellwood’s chief testimony coming from Paradise Lost and Paradise Re26 gained. Claims for Milton’s orthodoxy would therefore have to find their moorings elsewhere, and they did. With the same misgivings that Newton and Thyer later express, and in a way that accentuates the political implications of their later critical maneuvers, John Dunton is convinced that Milton must have altered certain of his opinions, and in 1697 Dunton fixes attention on Samson Agonistes, declaring: “Well rest the Ghost of poor Milton, who when you had blinded him, like his own Sampson, yet made a shift to give you one Sparring Blow, before he dy’d. For thus he compliments you, and instructs us in Samson Agonistes [of God’s giving to man ‘despotick Power/ Over his female ']." 27 The test poem for Milton’s orthodoxy had 24

See Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 301 (the entire subsection, pp. 297303,

is

relevant).

25

Richard Allcstree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford, 1673), Preface. Sec Thomas Ellwood, “Epitaph on Milton,” in Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 86. John Dunton, 'The Challenge Sent by a Lady to Sir Thomas ; or, The Female War (London, 1697), p. 210. 26

•

.

.

.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

[27]

Samson Agonistes the epics were too much of a piece, with the hesitations and ambiguities of Paradise Lost giving way to the openly and pointedly subversive vision of Paradise Regained. to be

Among

;

met with

the orthodox, the brief epic

ply slurred over in the understanding that

“cramped down by

a

wrong

was simhere Milton was

silence or

more generous,

choice” or,

that in

fragment of an uncompleted epic Milton “had only finish’d the most barren part of the poem.” 28 Whatever views he may have held when he wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and this

expressed therein, Milton comes to his senses in Samson Agonistes

and shows

women

of

Dalila],

to the life.”

Dunton

“their Picture [in the character

and,” says Dunton, “they can’t deny but

’tis

seems always to have preferred Milton’s tragedy to his epics, arguing early that Milton’s powers as a poet are here at their zenith and are as much in evidence in “The Description of Samson’s Death” as in this poem’s “terrible Satyr on Woman ." 29 Feminist issues were featured in Milton criticism at the outset, and

what appears

their presence in

comment on Samson

to be the first explicit critical

Agonistes releases the feminist enterprise

trom all charges that its concerns are anachronistic, though not from the charge that it is currently engaged in acts of appropriation

and bizarrely

is

recapitulating the history of Milton criticism.

At times, the new feminist mentarian criticism writ feminist criticism ian poet,

the

criticism looks like the old establish-

large.

The image of Milton

would propagate

first

—

new

of a strong, authoritar-

that

of the masculinists

that a

(the establishmentarian

Miltoir of the eighteenth century and of Harold Bloom), of a poet

orthodoxy (again the establishmentarian Milton of the eighteenth century, and this time of is the Milton of critical orthodoxy, an image Stanley Fish) hammered out of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes only by damaging the text of each poem. Such a criticism is not likely to advance until it is able to acknowledge that it is refocusing critical always bludgeoning

his readers into

—

2tt

See Richard Bentley, Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (London: 1732), p. 314; and also John Dunton, The Athenian Gazette; or, Casuistical Mercury (2 vols.; London, 1691), pt.

5,

no. 14.

29

See both of Dunton’s works, The Challenge Sent by a Lady pp. 233-34, and The Athenian Gazette, pt. 5, no. 14. See also Francis Peck, New Memoirs ofthe Life ,

and Poetical Works ofJohn Milton (London, 1740),

p. 85.

Feminist Milton

[28)

by Milton and contemporaries), and then lost in a

issues first focused

his

contemporaries (or near-

busy snaring Milton within the nets of its own orthodoxies and making of itself a protective guardian of his poetry and of a particular interpretation of criticism

Such containments of the radical and subversive elements in literature, we have been urged to remember, “can utterly falsify the historical meaning and resonance of past works,” as we see whenever Milton’s poems are made to speak platitudes and pie30 This is evident in Newton’s edities without searching them. tions of Milton’s last poems, where the defensive strategies of men are used to detour Milton’s hidden sexual politics and have it.

the effect of stalling interpretation.

Newton’s

editions are of special significance here because they

reveal (unintentionally) silence

these

in

Newton’s

what

poems

as

editions participate in the censoring of Milton, yet

they are but one part of

program

seemed necessary to suppress and they were being institutionalized. it

a

more

elaborate (almost orchestrated)

for censoring the poet in

exchange for canonizing cer-

poems. Christopher Hill, and even more Annabel Patterson, have cataloged the strategies through which poets evade censorship, many of them utilized by Milton, but what is of more immediate concern are certain patterns of suppression. Many of these patterns evident in the censoring of women’s tain

of

his

—

writings, according to Tillie Olsen and Joanna Russ

and strikingly evident

in efforts to

— are equally

suppress troubling aspects,

both theological and sociopolitical, of Milton’s writings. Almost

immediately there are

efforts to thwart, block,

and hide

a certain

consciousness in Milton’s poetry. That such efforts are evident as early as Lycidas and, as suggested

poem

the

in its

by

a

headnote Milton adds to

second printing concerning the downfall of the

corrupt clergy, already being resisted by the poet

may

indicate

something about why Milton was late getting started as a poet and even more tardy in bringing his great poems to their fulfillment, why there seems to have been a paralyzing of poetic capacity, and even why Milton virtually abandoned the medium of v

David Aers, Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress, “Introduction,” in Literature Language, and Society in England, 1580-1680 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), pp. viii-ix. ’See ,

*

1

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

some twenty

poetry for

adise Regained

some would

years or, as

and Samson Agonistes

[29]

argue, kept Par-

hopper for about

in the

as

Soon after the last poems were published, women writers “the mute inglorious Miltons” as they have been called” saw their Milton being reappropriated by a male readership and orthodox critical establishment. The result was a laming of interlong.

—

—

pretation.

The same

now

tactics often

used to suppress women’s writings were

being engaged to silence Milton’s, whole or in

same denial of agency, or perversion of Milton wanted to write one kind of poem but

the

it,

part.

instead wrote an-

,

two Miltons

Some works (

poet and one

a gifted

get lost

(

De

artist

in claims that there are

Paradise Regained),

the early

poems

as

a

reprehensible man.

Doctrina Christiana ), others are

and

still

writings) are ignored, even hidden. ical,

was an

— one good and the other bad, one orthodox and the

other not, or one

ginalized

of his medium, and

in control

is

in claims that

other, or that he plagiarized Paradise Lost or that he

not always

There

mar-

others (most of the prose

The prose

is

dismissed as top-

minor, and the brief epic and tragedy

as

the inconsequential (and embarrassing) efforts of a tired old

man

— while by virtue of

posed voiding of

its

supposedly staid religion and

political concern, Paradise Lost

is

its

sup-

accorded the

That Comus should rival Milton’s epic in popularity solidifies the impression of Milton as a poet of conventional moral virtue. Tactics may differ, but the purpose is always the same: to delimit, to demote, to suppress, to silence often by belittling and distorting, sometimes by isolating a work, thus confining attention to it, then by voiding what is controversial in status

of a

classic.

—

In the case of Paradise Lost, anything that erodes patriarchal

it.

values and culture

would be

fiting in its theology;

“controversial”: anything discom-

anything that veers toward

politics;

any-

thing that suggests male inadequacy or female independence, equality,

and

“The canon said,

32

and

it

virtue;

is

anything supportive of

a feminist

an attempt to shore up the status quo,”

might be added

that Paradise Lost

is

has been

admitted to the

Olsen, Silences (London: Virago, 1978), p. 10. Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (London:

31

it

outlook.

Tillie

32

Press, 1983), P-

1

5

-

The Women’s

Feminist Milton

[30]

canon only by hiding its antipatriarchal observation and then by deforming the poem into an argument ad feminam.

The image of Milton given currency by recent feminist criticism of a poet who would constrain women to the reigning

—

of female inferiority and female

ideologies

women

should and should not be and do

some of the

virtue,

of what

— can be inferred from

writings of Hannah More, but such an image

accord with the Milton of

a

more

not in

is

radical female readership that

searched his writings for arguments against male oppression.

Milton

may

represent

men

as

women

“mental despots” and

as

being under their tyranny, but instead of suggesting that

this is

how

of ref-

the

world should

be, his writings are a constant point

erence for those, such as

Mary Robinson, who urge

that

women

“shake off the yoke of sexual tyranny,” that whatever the “corporeal strength”

equal.”

33

At

of the sexes “in activity of mind time

a

when

most exulting zenith” ern British

opinions their

at all”

own

vocate

women

.

.

.

.

[they are]

“bigotry and prejudice were in their

at the

time of the

Bastille,

when “mod-

[were] scarcely allowed to express any

and, like the prophets of old, were not valued in

country

among

.

—

.

— Milton was being advanced

as the

female ad-

the English poets, his writings bringing solace to

and providing an important resource for such women as Jane West and Sarah Trimmer, who would relate the tale of their own times and act as guardians for

Trimmer can to

cite

West,

who

its

in turn

expose “sentimental wickedness ”

tion

educational systems. 34

in

Thus

would use Milton’s poetry and expunge Satanic decep-

from the modern novel. 35

Milton’s female readers

may

join their male counterparts in

worrying over the propriety of introducing sacred history to epic poetry, of mixing scriptural truths with literary fictions, and even chide Milton for “his attempts to give the conversations of DEITY and the celestial hosts.” But from their point of view, the “great poet Milton has certainly succeeded to admiration” in his 33

See

Mary Robinson,

Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the

Injustice

Mental Subordination (London, 1799), pp. 17, 55, 60. Cf. Mary Anne Radcliffe, The Female Advocate; or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (London, 1799), p. 25.

of

^See Radliffe, The Female Advocate, pp. 62, r, Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education

89. (5 vols.;

London, 1802-6),

I,

30.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

[31)

Adam

and Eve, bringing them within the reach of our understanding and into perfect accord with the design, docportrayal of

trine,

and example of Scripture, which

as

too often Milton’s male

of self-aggrandizement, chose to misconMilton’s male readership might be censured then, rather

readership, strue.

all

36

acts

in

Anna Seward

censures Dr. Johnson, for “injustice to Milton

.

.

.

producing] that levelling system of criticism, ‘which lifts the mean, and lays the mighty low.’”' 7 Indeed, the issue for Seward is finally one of “false criticism,” such as that propounded by Dr. Johnson in his strictures on Lycidas. According to Seward, “Johnson told me once, ‘he would hang a dog that read Lycidas twice.’ ‘What, then,’ replied I, ‘must become of me, who can say it by heart; and who often repeat it to myself, with a delight which grows by what it feeds upon?’ ‘Die,’ returned the growler, ‘in a surfeit of bad taste.’” In 1786, Seward writes to George Hardinge:

I

am charmed

to find

you among

the adorers of Milton’s Lycidas.

test-composition; and to read

That

is

a

read

it

without frequent recurrence, argues

the

judgment and

in the affections.

I

it

without pleasure

know

a

—

to have

morbid deficiency

that

it is

in

reprobated by

on the pale horse of that despot, is the pest of the present times, trampling beneath its “armed hoofs” the 38 richest and rarest flowers of genuis.

Johnson; but

Women

false criticism,

were becoming increasingly suspicious of

their

counterparts’ critical discourse, not only because of

its

maleerratic

judgments but also because of its erring instinct to align Milton, as Johnson does elsewhere, with custom and tradition, especially in the poet’s representation

Women

of the female sex.

propounded in that traditional ideas “were our own expressed with such frequency and vigour,” even by Milton, not because he accepted them but because he was bringing them unwere quick to credit the time by Christopher Hill,

^Ibid., pp.

203-4.

37

Anna Seward,

Letters of

possibility,

Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (6 vols.;

Edinburgh, 1811), I, 63. 38 Ibid., pp. 66, 191-92. Cf. Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More,

I,

212.

— Feminist Milton

[32]

der review and subjecting

them

to challenge.

39

feature not of Milton’s poetry but of reflections late

Orthodoxy is a on his poetry by

seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century readers

who

cast

themselves in the role of priests. The price levied against Milton

was a heavy one, for in the process the horizonal change represented by the concerns inscribed within his epic, and for canonization

the very consciousness that conceived of those concerns, have

been detoured and depressed so say,

it

now

that, as

Hans Robert Jauss might

requires a special effort to read Paradise Lost, an effort

that should be

made by

Miltonists and feminists alike to read

across the grain of the accustomed experience of the

poem

der to catch sight of the poem’s true aspect. 40 After

all,

poem

written out of a

moment of crisis

about that

in or-

this is a

moment of cri-

profound sense of alienation, dislocation, and, without usually withdrawing from or recanting the ideological positions assumed in the prose works, places those positions under extraordinary pressure and scrutiny. The question of how Milton was read is irrevocably involved with the question of how to read Milton; the poem’s reception is an aid, not an impediment, to interpretation. And the history of exhibits a

sis; it

reception,

its

digms

however checkered,

reveals

for female response to Paradise Lost

Mary Shelley and the And there are more than

more than two

para-

— the quivering acqui-

escence of

ardent revisionism of Emily

Bronte.

these

two images of Milton

deriving from his early female readership, and Milton himself

evokes something other than self-loathing ship. In

tions

any event,

his ideas are

by and implications

for

in

much of that

one thing, and

women

reader-

their interpreta-

are another but not neces-

sarily altogether different matter.

There are

women

such as Sarah

Trimmer who, Doris Mary

were able “to produce a Paradise Lost from pocket for the settlement of a textual point disputed by the company” 41 and who would also, like Hannah More, stem the more revolutionary forces represented by a Mary Wollstonecraft; who on the face of things seem to admire just those qualities Stenton

39

states,

.

.

.

Hill, Collected Essays, p. 57.

^See Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, esp. p. 26. *'Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 300.

•

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

subordination

instability, capriciousness,

—

[33]

that others, including

Milton himself, found so demeaning in women; who, once educated into submission, as

is

often supposed of More, internalize

but insistently

dominant patriarchal culture that Milton quietly opposes. But even More is a more complicated

figure than she

is

the voices of the

often represented as being, although she writes,

for example:

1

have been

much

pestered to read the “Rights of Women,” but

invincibly resolved not to do

jargon: besides there title.

How many

have

as

maid,

Of all jargon,

something

ways

fantastic

hate metaphysical

I

and absurd

I

I

for

me.

this confession.

final

I

I

If

I

in the

am now am

there are of being ridiculous!

much liberty as can make a good use of, and when was a young one, had, dare

was good

Her

is

it.

were

still

young, perhaps

I

I

I

very

sure

I

an old

more than should not make say,

42

observation suggests

More

herself realized that, to an-

other generation, her ideas were likely to seem outmoded.

of her ideas did seem

so,

but not

education, certainly, and not

all

all

of them

Some

— not her ideas on

her ideas about Milton, as evi-

addressed to her in 1799 by Elizabeth Montagu, speaks of “the good” More has done her sex:

denced by

who

am

a letter

You have judiciously

modern education, which seems calculated entirely to qualify young women for whatever their godfathers and godmothers had renounced for them at their baptism; and what is most shocking, is that a virtuous matron pointed out the errors of

and tender mother, values herself much on not having omitted anything that can

fit

her daughters for the world, the flesh, and the

devil. Brilliant talents, graces

displaying these advantages,

of

girls:

the virtues that

useful qualities that i2

is all

that

is

make domestic a

a

aimed life

confirmed habit of at in the

education

happy, the sober and

moderate fortune and

a retired situation

and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, II, 371. More appositely in Strictures on Female Education, in The Works of Hannah

Memoirs of

comments

make

of person, and

More, V, 230:

the Life

“among

the innovations of this innovating period, the imposing

term of rights has been produced to sanctify the claim of our female pretenders, with a view not only to rekindle in the minds of women a presumptuous vanity, dishonourable to their sex, but produced with a view to excite in their hearts an impious discontent with the part which God has assigned them in this world.”

Feminist Milton

[34]

comfortable, are never inculcated.

.

.

The

.

parents’ first error in the

preference of accomplishments to virtues, leads naturally their

miseducated

girls to prefer

the guide of life.

I

make it the demon

sentiment to principle, and to

was charmed with your making

of sentiment, and Abdiel the angel of that principles only will preserve a

principle:

woman

Belial

and so sure

am

I,

in the constant obser-

vance of the laws of God, and the duties of her situation, that

I

will

venture to assure the young ladies that the most sentimental of their

admirers would prefer (for

a

of the daughters of faithful Abdiel, to

and graceful daughters of the demon of

accomplished,

ment

most simple and unadorned the most highly finished, and

wife) the

senti-

43 .

Hannah More had

distinguished between

women

of sentiment

women of principle as early as 1777, in the course of arguing that women are as capable as men. If they are not always recog-

and

nized as such, she believes,

it is

tion and the anatomizers of

Appendix

What

C).

More’s writings vorite poet

—

is

is

that

human

evident from even

rule

character of Milton’s

of charity,

Eve

of “that beautiful picture Milton draws of our as she

first

all

(see

casual perusal of poet’’

and her

fa-

as to

as well as the

poet of

women

they should aspire to be, in the

Appendix D). 44 Thus More writes of correct and elegant propriety which

when he delineates ‘those thouflow / From all her words and ac-

mother,

contends that “each sex has

excellences” and thereupon asks, in perfection,

men

(see

sand decencies which daily

even

a

— “God’s own Milton

find their finest portrait,

tions,’”

character have been

the poet of “Bible Christianity,” of pure religion

founded upon the

who

is

only because historians of civiliza-

“Is either

its

own

proper

sex so abounding

be independent of the other for improve-

ment?” 45 Ai

85-86; and see Appendix C, as well as the subtle and persuasive essay by Mitzi Myers, “Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology,” in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1813, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 264-84. “See Hannah More, Sacred Dramas, in The Works of Hannah More, I, 1, as well as Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, III, 196, 360. “Hannah More, Strictures on Female Education, in The Works of Hannah More, V, 5, 23 (see also in the same work, “An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World,” XI, 155), and Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, III, 17.

The

Letters of

Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu,

III,

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

Beside the voices of

more independent

Trimmer and More

there are other

poem

a

that urges the creation

women, while gross or fine.”

who

And

there

is

of

a class

me

not”

of “letter’d”

“mind knows no gender, but of

insisting that

46

still

voices of the eighteenth century. In 1763, Mrs.

Pedia, “Education herself,” protests, “Milton disdained

within

[35]

the wife in

Mary Walker’s Munster

The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as furnishing her with rationale and sanction for walking out on her husband, and in Walker’s epistolary novel Letters from the Duchess Village

cites

de Crui and Others, on Subjects Moral and Entertaining there

is

Mrs.

who remembers what Mr. Bruce says of Lady Sophia as he reflects upon woman and her place in the providential scheme by citing two lines from Paradise Lost “O fairest of creation, last and best / Of all God’s works”: Ross,

,

The

woman,

heart of

am

is

a

temple, where virtue should always re-

from thinking fas presumably Milton was far from thinking] lightly of your sex. You are designed by Providence, to spread the same splendour and chearfulness through the intellectual ceconomy, that celestial bodies diffuse over the material part of side:

I

creation.

There

far

47

is

also the

powerful voice of Catherine Macaulay,

who

1774 finds in Paradise Lost supreme examples of love and charity being set before the minds of a wavering people, and the voice in

of Mary Wollstonecraft,

who

The Female Reader (1789), having printed from Book IV of Paradise Lost the “Conversation between Adam and Eve on Going to Rest” and from Book V their “Morning Hymn,” reminds us through the words of others that she is “sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton” always from those who “could not enter into the spirit” of Milton or understand

him and who

fail

to

in

remember

^See James Elphinston’s Education, 40; and John Walter Good, Studies in

that

Eve

is

represented to Raphael,

Four Books (London, 1763), pp. 32, 35, the Milton Tradition (Urbana: Univ. of Illiin

nois, 1915), p. 86. 47

See, respectively,

Mary

Walker’s Village de Munster

(2 vols.; Paris

and Rot-

terdam, 1782), I, 141-42, and her “Letter XXII,” in Letters from the Duchess De Crui and Others, on Subjects Moral and Entertaining, 3rd ed. (2 vols.; Dublin,

The

was printed don in 1776. Cf. Die Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Barbauld (6 vols.; London, 1804), VI, 191, 198. •779).

L 193;

cf.

I,

274, 278-79.

first

edition of Letters

in

Lon-

Lactitia

Feminist Milton

[36]

in

Adam’s discourse with

a

lustrous mind:

eyes

/

In

the angel, not as a physical object but as

“Grace was

in

all

her steps, heav’n in her

her gestures dignity and love.” 48

all

Not

just another

Eve who pleases after the Fall and emerges from Wollstonecraft’s volume (“a forging ground for independent womanhood”) as an exception to rather than as evidence for the argument that “nowhere is the sex treated with contempt as in England.” 49 There is also the haunting voice

“man” of his

times, Milton creates an

of Wollstonecraft’s eighteen-year-old daughter, tures the sentiment

home fail

in hell”

50

but that

to recognize

Frankenstein,

its

of her mother that “Milton is

.

voice that cap-

a .

.

nevertheless distorted

and acknowledge

seems quite

at

by those who

that the Miltonic epigraph to

Miltonic preface, and

much of

the book’s Mil-

framework are owing to her poet-husband, not to Mary, a husband who has been called the first of the male feminists. There are also the voices of the white woman’s black sisters and brothers, in other ways so sympathetic to a feminist criticism, whose own paradigmatic response to Milton in the eightonic

51

teenth century and after encompasses and emulates the subversive character of his

when given a by Brooks Watson, Lord Mayor of London,

art. Phillis

Wheatley, for example,

copy of Paradise Lost knew it was no king’s book, but instead a book through which slaves could win their freedom. A century later, Anna Julia Cooper, in Voice from the South, could articulate Milton’s libertarian themes and press Milton’s poems, especially what they say about women, into service for liberating her people. For Cooper, Milton is the right poet for people who are writhing under a mighty wrong; he is the poet who extended women’s horizons, the poet for any group long exploited and frequently disparaged. 52 It may be that “much” of Milton is “preacherly” (his

48

See Good, Studies

The Female Reader, ed.

and Mary Wollstonecraft, Moira Ferguson (Delmar, N. Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and

in the

Milton Tradition,

p. 256,

Reprints, 1980), pp. 8, 59. 4V See Wollstoncraft, 1 'he Female Reader, pp. vi, xxvii. ^Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures oj Arabella (1783), ed. Margaret Dalziel (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 173 5l

-

See Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism

Harvard Univ.

in

Shelley

(Cambridge, Mass.:

Press, 1979), pp. 3, 164-96.

“See Anna Julia Cooper’s Voice from the South (Xenia, Ohio: Aldene Printing House, 1892), p. 69. am indebted to Carolivia Herron for this reference. I

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

God,

who

for example,

is

said to

propound seventeenth-century

theology) and that this part of his

and forgotten.” But

at

(37)

work should “be

left

behind

other times, especially in his representation

of Eve, Milton becomes

a

poet and so

is

numbered among

that

noble army whose “price of board and keep dwindles into noth-

when compared with what

ingness .

.

.

world owes them; [who| having lived” and, from Cooper’s

dignify the world for their

the

point of view, dignified the world, in the case of Milton, by dig-

women Most black women 53

nifying

.

and some American white

Margaret Fuller certainly regarded

would

later do, as “the arena in

zation

is

to be

won ,”

54

country,

their

women

like

Cooper

as

which the next triumph of civili-

and recognized Milton

as their advocate,

not an enemy, even as they suggest that sexual difference

is

an

and often faulty way of sorting Milton’s readers. There are cultural, class, racial, and ideological differences to be documented as well. These are the categories that really matter, and initial

they are likely to produce an altogether different kind of sorting.

The Milton of these women

is

manifestly the Milton of Margaret

Fuller:

“Milton lived in

more emphatically American than any author who has the United States.” He is so because in him is expressed so is

much of the is

primitive vitality of that thought from which America

born, though

many ways. He

at is

present disposed to forswear her lineage in so the purity of Puritanism.

ture of liberty, of justice .

tion of conscience

— what

is

He understood

the na-

required for the unimpeded ac-

— what constitutes true marriage, and the scope

manly education. He is one of the Fathers of the Age, of that new Idea which agitates the sleep of Europe, and of which America, if awake to the design of Heaven and her own duty, would become the principal exponent. But the Father is still far beyond the of

a

understanding of this child.”

Women tions,

writers, especially, direct us to a set of crucial ques-

some of which we have

which we must 53

Ibid. ,

M Ibid.,

now

address.

already entertained and others of

Why

do some readers of

pp. 183, 275. p. 12.

Margaret Fuller, “The Prose Works of Milton,” Art (New York, 1846), pp. 38-39. 55

Paradise

in Papers on Literature

and

Feminist Milton

[38]

Lost

—

real, historical

readers of the

poem

—

find a Milton

who

is

wavering from the masculinist, misogynist line and who is currying favor with women? What were the horizons of expectations in Milton’s own time for his last poems, especially in their dealing with feminist issues? To what extent did Milton’s own prose writings shape those horizons of expectations, and were

works of “backhanded inspiration’’? 56 How did Milton himself, and his contemporaries, accommodate such expectations by fulfilling or frustrating, by satisfying or suppressing them? Was Milton’s female readership sensitive to the play between anticipation and correction of expectations that was a distinct feature of early these writings, for women, something other than

—

Milton criticism, and play?

What

how

did that readership cope with such

the conditions and

are

censorship, and to

what extent

is

ployed strategies of indirection fact that Paradise Lost

proof-texts?

To what

provides extent

Milton himself, because he em-

—

poetics of the glance

a

own

sponsible for the confusions his

codes for writing under

re-

poetry has wrought, for the

many competing

with so

critics

is

—

Marvell equally responsible for

such confusions? As Patterson shows, “Authors

who

build ambi-

words have no control over what happens to Still, it seems unfair, where there is “pervasive but

guity into their

them

later.”

57

often covert [radicalism] ... to abstract statements of a repressive

sexual ethos

“complex, as

.

.

and [then

to] take

them

at their

detached face

thereby effacing from the historical record Milton’s

value,”

If,

.

view of women.” 58

albeit at times ambivalent,

Marcia Landy claims, what

reading of Milton’s

poems

is

really “at issue in a feminist

the circumscribed

not whether Milton’s attitude

must know before rushing

is

is

positive or negative,” 59 then

to judgment

*1

borrow the phrase from Aaron Hill’s letter 1730), in The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 57

Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 18.

38

See David Aers and

Bob Hodge,

image of woman,

why to I,

the

image

is

we

circum-

Samuel Richardson

(1

June

2.

“‘Rational Burning’: Milton on Sex and

$80- 1680 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), p. 151; and Marilyn R. Farwell, “Eve, the Separation Scene, and the Renaissance Idea of Androgyny,” Milton Studies, 16 (1982), 17. Marriage,”

in Literature, Language,

and Society

in

England,

1

w Marcia Landy, “A Free and Open Encounter: Milton and the Modern Reader,” Milton Studies, 9 (1976), 28.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes scribed, the implications of

Milton deliberately made

would be so. Adam’s censorship,”

that

it

censorship

it

its

being circumscribed

[39]

— whether

so or whether instead others ensured

know

Is

“Eve’s desire to

as

Landy contends, 60 or

itself the limiting

presence in this

is

.

.

limited by

.

institutionalized

poem? Milton may

measure of responsibility for certain of these confusions, but the largest measure of responsibility must be borne by his early editors and commentators, and we who follow them, for attending only to the obvious, thereby voiding and silencing coy ambiguity in a cleverly contrived narrative with continually shifting and often competing perspectives. have to bear

a

Early in the eighteenth century, Milton was

boys and

girls

then in school, and later in the

recommended to same century that

recommendation appears to have become institutionalized. A girl of three years was witnessed lisping Milton’s poetry, and a boy of sixteen years was heard reciting perfectly Books I, II, and VI of Paradise Lost. Indeed, year,

was

able “to repeat the

and “had been heard filled

Anna Seward, when first

to say, that

three its

she reached her ninth

books of Paradise Lost”

sublime passages

.

.

.

often

her infant eyes with tears of delight, while she committed

portion of them to

memory.”

61

How

was Milton’s poetry

a

trans-

What were

mitted to schoolchildren and to the popular culture?

numerous adaptations for schoolchildren like, and was the same text being transmitted to young girls and young boys? The boy who knows Books I, II, and VI by heart, and Hannah More the

“’Marpia Landy, “Kingship and the Role of

Women

in Paradise Lost," Milton

Studies, 4 (1972), 12. 61

See Ladies’ Monthly Museum, 20 (1824), 96, as well as

Raymond Dexter Ha-

vens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.

London: Humphrey Milford, 1922), p. 25. It should be noted, moreover, that female poets have been imitating Milton’s poetry and parodying its style since the early eighteenth century (e.g., “Fanscomb Barn: In Imitation of Milton,” in The Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1903], pp. 210-13) and that their saturation in Milton’s poetry seems typical. Her first editor reports of Susanna Blamire, that she was who attended only the village school, “We have a clear proof conversant ... [at a very early period of life] with the writing of Milton”; see The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, ed. Henry Londsdale and Patrick Maxwell (Edinburgh and London, 1842), p. xxviii. Similarly, Maria Bowdler tells of how both she and Elizabeth Smith studied Milton at an early age (see Press;

.

Fragments 33 )-

in

Prose and Verse,

By Miss

.

.

Elizabeth Smith [1808; rpt. Boston, 1810], p.

Feminist Milton

[40]

(whose heart

may

there

is

in the

Edenic books of the poem), suggest that

be differences.

But there

is

also a

powerful influence, yet to be recorded, of

Milton’s female on his male readership.

Women

men’s attention to precisely those books that touring.

Hannah More

were turning men had been de-

reports a friend’s visiting William Pitt;

“He was reading Milton aloud with great emphasis, and he said his mind was so totally engaged in Paradise that he had forgotten world but Adam and Eve.” 62 As Jauss observes, “It is only through the process of mediation that the work enters a changing horizon-of-expectation,” producing the inversion that moves us “from simple reception to critical understanding, from passive to active reception, from recognized 63 aesthetic norms to a new production that surpasses them.” The yet-to-be-documented role played by Milton’s female readership in this process is simply phenomenal, and the documentation shows decisively that women’s hermeneutic suspicion does not

were other people

there

in the

Some

always eventuate in an antithetical criticism of Milton.

women certainly — and not always subservient, acquiescent women — heard in his voice the “undersong of their own hu.

man

hopes.”

Whatever may have become the

when

in the

.

.

64

case in the nineteenth century

hands of the Victorians Paradise Lost was newly the-

when Victorian women were poem than to current readings of

ologized and conventionalized, and

now it,

a

responding

less to

Milton’s

wholly different (much

less adversarial) attitude

toward Mil-

ton characterizes his female readership in the eighteenth century.

This

is

not to say that an earlier readership of the poet does not

register adversarial attitudes, only that such attitudes are leveled

not against Milton but against male readers of his poetry who, twisting

it

out of shape, would then turn that poetry to their

own

advantage; against male readers determined to maintain sexual difference through female subjection. In the

62

See Annette

M.

B. Meakin, Hannah More:

Smith, Elder, and Co., 1911),

p.

A

words of one

reader:

Biographical Study (London:

273.

63

Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 19. ^William Shullenberger, “Wrestling with the Angel: Jauss,

nist Criticism,” Milton Quarterly,

20 (1986), 69.

Paradise Lost

and Femi-

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes

Women combs;

manners of Soldiers and Coxthey easily adopt the manners of the Ignorant and has a contrary effect on our sex; as nothing is more

are fond of imitating the that

Impudent.

is,

—

It

certain, than that the

effeminate.

mincing

— What

Woman

masculine

and

step,

company of Women

sight, Sir,

and an effeminate Man?

tone of voice, and

a

a

his

Lady with

confident stare,

sights, Sir, are daily seen;

with her eyes!

leer

all

social happiness

owing

to that

a

— Such

a

a care-

vindictive

now

loud licentious laugh, with every

very immodest significant

of equality.

us despicably

— See my Lord with

and

his lilly-hand in a muff;

swing of her arm,

founding the

make

will

so ridiculous and shocking, as a

is

less military air, a

a

[41)

and then shocking

infamous custom of

of the Sexes upon an ill-judged plan

65

The Milton of sexual equality was a Milton that his male ship would not countenance and a Milton that his female

readerreader-

almost without exception, sought to promote.

ship,

— and riod almost always by men — It is

said

picture of

all

too often

women

all

until the onset

of the Victorian pe-

“Milton gives

that

through Paradise

Lost.

She

a rather

sorry

represented as

is

being unequal to man, dependent upon him, and passionate:

‘He for

God

to say that

only, she for

woman

is

God

in

him .”’ 66 But

more

it is

.

.

.

accurate

by Milton’s eighteenth-

so represented

century male readership, but not by the female readership of the

same

period. For example,

Mary

Wollstonecraft typifies

a

more

and chiefly female response to Milton in her de-

alert, sensitive,

tection of calculated contradictions and conflicting signals in Paradise Lost,

nals

and

in her directive that those contradictions

do not diminish

women

but

response suggests that Milton their adversary.

“How

they advise us that 65

is

work

to their advantage.

are

sig-

Her

women, not she says, when

an advocate for

grossly they do insult us,”

“women

and

formed

anonymous Female Government!

for softness

and sweet

at-

from a Gentleman to His Friend on the Education of the Fair-Sex (London, 1779), pp. 12-13. “See, e.g., Luther Weeks Courtney, Hannah More’s Interest in Education and Government (Waco, Tex.: Baylor Univ. Press, 1929), p. 8. Courtney assumes See the

or,

Letters

an accurate description of Milton’s attitude toward women and presumes that Milton’s is a faithful representation of the eighteenth-century attitude tothis

is

ward women.

Feminist Milton

[42]

tractive grace ... to gratify the senses

“gentle, domestic brutes,” as

only created to see through trust.”

On

67

of man,” thus rendering us

when woman

is

medium, and

a glass

“represented as to take things

on

the other hand, Wollstonecraft can also speak of

“Milton’s pleasing picture of paradisiacal happiness” and even of a

coincidence between her ideas concerning

women

and Milton’s

when in Paradise Lost Milton subscribes to the view that “women, considered not only as moral, but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by

own,

as

means

men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being,” or when, also in Milton, she finds “proofs of reason, as well as genius” against all those arguments contemptuthe same

as

ous of “the female understanding.” 68

how women

Just

and

representative Wollstonecraft’s ideas about Milton are

is

suggested by an item in the Lady’s Magazine,

of 1792, where Milton’s Eve is used to instance the idealism of “dignity without pride, affability without meanness, and simple elegance without affectation”: also

Grace was

in her steps,

heaven

In every gesture dignity

The sentiments

in her eye.

and love. 66

own, and their representative character is attested to still further by John Aikin’s popular and influential “Essay on the Poetry of Milton” (reprinted by his daughter), where it is conceded that Adam and Eve alike exhibit a “prematurity of understanding” they both know too much! " Throughout the eighteenth century, it appears, Milton’s female readership was responding not only to its own reading but also to are Wollstonecraft’s

—

67

Mary

Wollstonecraft quoted in Ulrich H. Hardt,

Wollstonecraft’s

“A

7

A

of Mary on Political and

Critical Edition

Vindication of the Rights of Women,” With Strictures

Moral Subjects (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1982), pp. 55, 92. “Quotations from ibid., pp. 66, 92, 154. “See the anonymous “On Female Conduct and Behavior,” Lady’s Magazine, 23 (1792), 11. These frequently quoted lines become a shorthand representation of Milton’s high regard for women; see, e.g., the title-page quotation from the

anonymous

A

Young Lady, 6th ed. (Birmingham, 1768), as well as James Elphinston’s Animadversions upon Elements of Criticism (London, 1771), p. 3, and Walker’s Letters from the Duchess De Crui and Others, II, 159 7

Lady’s Preceptor;

or,

Letter to a

.

"See

Lucy Aikin, Memoir ofJohn Aikin,

p. 188.

Cross-Currents and Cross-Purposes others’ readings of Milton’s text

whose

[

43

]

flattening simplifications

and manglings seemed to be perverting its drift. Their efforts arc meant at once to correct establishmentarian criticism and to clarMilton’s vision in the very act of redeeming

ify

And

Milton’s vision

through the strategies

redeemed by

is

we would

this

it.

female readership

recognize today as those of

“new

historicism” and “deconstructionism.” Paradise Lost

of the

many

is

one

of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that, Stephen Greenblatt might say, are “fields of force, places of

as

texts

dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of or-

thodox and subversive impulses.” 71 the traditions

summons,

it

a text that

It is

deconstructs

thus revealing what issues have tradi-

tionally been concealed or forbidden or repressed.

which

cultural

sentations,

commonplaces seem always

Paradise Lost

text in

to find interior repre-

an early sponsor of the Derridean

is

proposition “Traditionality

is

not orthodoxy.” 72 Milton’s early

map of

female readership provides us with “a

which we

A

learn that Paradise Lost, full

breaches,” from

of dislocations and

fissures,

written in a “double register” and with a “critical conscious-

is

which

ness,”

searching

from

its

is

own

impulses

—

77

narration.

and

Milton

obfuscating

to say that the

gathered

without

poem

women

In turn,

from

altogether

a narrative continually

is

poetry

his

obscuring

writers learned strategies

their

strategies for privatizing their often risky

for

subversive

and some-

times dangerous visions. Paradise Lost, they understood, was

poem of radical Christianity

cal

a

questioning, both of Western culture and histori-

—

a

poem of

interrogations

from within and

•without, including an interrogation of God and of Satan, both of

whom, of the

in turn, function as

first

wave of

our interrogators. The chief concern

feminist criticism

with the forces, no

is

less

than the failures, of Milton’s consciousness. 71

See Stephen Greenblatt’s “Introduction” to The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 6; see also pp. 4-5.

The volume

72

Jacques Derrida, Writings and Difference, trans.

Chicago

of Genre. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of

is a

special issue

Press, 1978), p. 74.

’See ibid., pp. 21, 205.

The language on

p. 21 is

Pierre Marivaux’s.

Chapter 3

Milton’s Early

Female Readership The greatness of literature good writers; it is also in

is

not only in the great writers, the

that

which explains much and

tells

much.

—

Tillie

Olsen

on provocation and dissent, and its renovation depends on the discovery of new questions with which to interrogate books and ways of talking about them. Feminism

Literary art thrives

is

well-stocked with such questions.

The eighteenth century was its

neoclassicism

more

it

more

doubtless

has seemed, and in

— K. K. Ruthven

its

variegated than in

Milton criticism

it

was

diversified than standard representations suggest. Literary

historians are not tury, in

its

wrong when

they speak of the eighteenth cen-

neoclassical aspect, as a period of fixed, settled literary

premises, a period pressing into the folds of

its

and poor guides for

own us,

all it

could, even of Milton’s poetry,

orthodoxies. But they are misguided,

when

they

undercurrent” running counter to not so

much

fail

this

“a general and popular

.

acknowledge “a large neoclassicism, which was to

.

.

,

but rather an

elitist

movement,” as Walter Jackson Bate observes and whose Milton was different from, not identical with, the Milton of the popular culture. And Milton was first and foremost the property of the popular culture, with editions of Paradise Lost numbering 1

,

‘Walter Jackson Bate, 7 he Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 16-17, 23.

I44]

]

.

Milton’s Early Female Readership [

over one hundred,

many of them

illustrated,

and just

as often

45 il-

more than seventy editions of his complete poems. read Para1796 an anonymous writer asked, “Who has not

lustrated the In

3

.

.

and Paradise Regained?’” By 1800 there were four sepaeditions of Paradise Regained (1779, 1793, 1795, 1800), and

dise Lost rate

Samson Agonistes had been printed separately in Bell’s British Theatre (1796). Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained were now generating epic cycles.

Moreover, there were multiple translations of Paradise Lost into French and Italian, Greek and Latin, Dutch and German, and translations of the poem into Danish, Manx, Polish, and Russian as well. These translations became breeders of still other translations of Milton’s epic prophecy into Bohemian, Czech, Icelandic, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh. At least in France, Paradise Regained was also caught up in this translation fever. Individual books of Paradise Lost (first Books IV, VI, and IX in 1699, then Book I in 1738, and by the end of the century, Books I-VI) were published separately and often subjected to imitation, adaptation, and paraphrase. Sometimes just portions of books were printed, often as lyrical extracts, with Scholae Bathoniensis (1717) furnishing a fair representation of the typical excerpts, and with those excerpts in turn pointing to books now receiving pre-

2

See The Monthly Review, 21 (1796), 226. In contrast. The London Magazine, 7 (1823), 216, reports that Milton is little read and much of his poetry neglected: “his ‘Paradise Regained’

...

is

little

known.

Who knows

his

.

.

.

’Samson

Agonistes.’” 3

On

both John Walter Good, Studies in the Milton Tradition (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1915), and Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1922), as well as the two important volumes compiled by John T. Shawcross: Milton: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) and Milton, 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). On Milton’s epics generating epic cycles, see Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 159-67. See also Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). In addition, the eighteenth century produced adaptations of L’ Allegro and II Penseroso, Comus and Samson Agonistes, and separate editions of both Comus and Lycidas, as well as of the following prose works: The Readie and Easie Way A Treatise of Civil Power, Pro Populo Anglicatio Defensio, OJ Education and Areopagi-

Milton

in the eighteenth century, see

,

tica,

and The History o f Britain. The clustering of editions of the the 1790s and early decades of the nineteenth century is noteworthy.

Eikonoklastes,

prose in

— Feminist Milton

[46]

ponderant attention: “Pandemonium,”

Down

“Raphael’s Going

to Paradise,”

“Adam Admiring Eve,” “Adam Calling] Eve to

Changing Himself Complaint After the Fall.” 4 into a Cherube,” “Adam’s Blake’s reported preference for Book IV, which he is said to have read regularly with his wife, both nude in their garden, whether Behold

.

.

.

[This] Glorious Being,” “Satan .

.

apocryphal or not,

an accurate index to the age and

is

interest in Milton’s

.

poem. That

its

center of

interest registers itself again in

the various efforts to turn Milton’s blank verse into both prose

and rhyme and

now

in the

corresponding efforts to turn the

into an oratorio and

now

into a play.

Milton was an emanation of the bent upon penetrating to

poem

l’esprit

spirit

de Milton

of an age that was 5 .

itself

The vogue Milton en-

joyed in France, particularly during the revolutionary years, is ample evidence of what that spirit was deemed to be: the hero of an earlier (as, well as this later) revolutionary cause, Milton was likewise seen as a sponsor of women’s liberation and thus an antidote to authors prone to exaggeration and hyperbole who tended, as was then

women

common,

to “attribute the vices

of some par-

6

whole sex.” The Milton of neoclassicism may be a poet of commonplaces and a spokesperson for orthodoxy, but the Milton of the popular culture was an interrogator of such commonplaces who, with heroic defiance, was determined to uproot orthodoxies social, political, and religious especially those perpetrated about women by a patriarchal reliticular

to the

—

gion and

a

The

masculinist society.

so-called feminist issues in

Milton’s writings are the invention not of our

own

time but of an

4

See Scholae Bathoniensis (London, 1717). See also James Greenwood, The Virgin Muse. Being a Collection of Poems Designed for the Use of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, at Schools (London, 1717), which reprints Eve’s account of herself to .

Adam from Book

IV

.

.

(pp. 38 — 39)

and Adam’s account of her creation and their marriage from Book VIII (pp. 40-43), the Morning Hymn from Book V (pp. 159-61), a lengthy portion of the story of creation from Book VII (pp. 112-22), and the visions of death and of the flood from Book XI (pp. 21, 23), as well as the prologue to Book III (pp. 142-44) and the “O Loss of Sight” soliloquy from Samson Agonistes (pp. 137-39). "The title of L’ Esprit de Milton (Orleans, 1808) captures the concern of Milton criticism 6

from 1789

See the

to the

end of the Romantic period.

anonymous Female

Proved (South Shields, 1832),

Rights

p. 76.

Vindicated: or,

The Equality of

the Sexes

)

Milton’s Early Female Readership earlier time,

when

among

47

they were of such paramount concern that

they must be numbered as the century) as

1

first

and (through the eighteenth

the primary issues engaged

by

critical dis-

course.

Though

not specifically named, Paradise Lost seems to stand

behind certain poems of the 1680s where the issue of male superiority, once asserted, is vigorously debated. In The Great Birth of

Man

(1681),

“M.S.” (probably Matthew Stevens) moves toward 7

the conclusion that with “lustful Heart, and longings of her Eye,”

woman

a

is

Noble Image, and our Godlike

disgrace to “our

Race.” Devourers of men,

women

are treacherous, deceitful, and

prideful:

That Pride which

And was by

cast

from Heav’n,

Lucifer

Foolish Eve renewed again,

Will ever in depraved

On

down

way toward

Woman

Reign.

M.S. juxtaposes female “softness” and “more solid Man,” his rationality and her propensity for “Guilded, Airy Visions,” even as he explains that such “Satyrical” treatment is owing to “only what we may suppose Adam had come to say from the Treach’ry of Eve” suppositions that must have derived from Milton for even a seven-yearold could discern that not the Bible but Milton “supposed what they said and did, and then wrote it down.”* This, then, is what M.S. supposes Adam to have said concerning male and female the

this conclusion,

—

creation:

His was

a

pure Creation. Hers alone

Woman

from a Bone: He’s born immediately of God, her Birth Is but from him, a little of his Earth: Her Elements and Substance from Him, He

Species transform’d, a

—

Had

all

his

Substance of the Deity

9 .

7

M.S. [Matthew Stevens?], The Great Birth of Matt; or, The Excellency of Man’s Creation and Endowments Above the Original of Woman. A Poem (London, 1681), A2, pp.

sig.

6, 10, 15, 23.

W. Bradburn’s

8

See Eliza

9

The Great

Story of “Paradise Lost” (Portland, 1830), p.

Birth of Man, pp. 3-4.

5.

Feminist Milton

[48]

argument comes from Genesis, Milton is nevertheless its conduit, through Adam’s harsh words after the Fall enabling others to suppose what the first man said about, and to, the first woman, and thus shaping in others an attitude they could hold toward the opposite sex. Five years later, in 1686, the female sex will be dubbed the lewd sex by Robert Gould, who because of the example of the faithless Sylvia declares “endless War” against the pride, lust, and inconstancy of women, who commonly have an “ingredient of Fallen- Angel in their composition” and who are thus a “sure way to hell.” 10 In the same year, “S.F.” (probably Sarah Fyge Egerton) issues a response to such spiteful rhymes under the title The Female Advocate. Woman is said to complete and If the

perfect an otherwise “scant” creation, and her

fall is

represented

more understandable inasmuch as she is tempted by supernatural power and Adam by a co-equal. In this battle of

as altogether a

the sexes, each side finds in Genesis scriptural sanction for

guments and, potent

ally.

as the battle continues, will reach

Robert Gould’s poetic

to the

Female Author of

“was

a

a

Poem

Guide,”

Bitter, e’re long,

is,

always

prefixed by an epigraph from Paradise Lost

is

Revenge

That

is

Milton’s voice

is

it

its

author

a

“Blind

:

sweet,

at first, tho’

back on

a

Satyrical Epistle

(1691), declaring that

B[itch]” and that the female will

ar-

out to Milton as

A

retaliation,

its

self recoils.

11

introduced to and heard in this

initially

dispute as the voice of Satan plotting the revenge that will

undo

God’s creation. It will be heard again and again in this dispute as the voice of Satan who, in Paradise Regained, recollects that Eve fell by his enticements whereas “Adam by his Wives allurement fell” (II. 134), or sometimes as the voice of Belial, who in the same

poem observes that women “draw / Hearts after them tangl’d Amorous Nets” (II. 161-62). Women, however, are less prone '"Robert Gould, Love Given O’re;

&

or,

A

c.

and sig. a2 Poem, Called

.

&

10. or,

An Answer

to a

Late Sa-

of Woman (London, 1686), pp. 2, 3, See also Robert Gould’s Satirical Epistle to the Female Author of a

tyr Against the Pride, Lust, v

to

Satyr Against the Pride, Lust and Incon-

of Woman (London, 1686), sig. A2, pp. 1, "S.F. [Sarah Fyge Egerton?), The Female Advocate;

stancy,

in

and Inconstancy,

Silvia’s Revenge,

&

c.

c.

(London, 1691), pp.

3, 7.

1

Milton’s Early Female Readership

hear Milton’s voice speaking through that of Satan.

Mary

Astell,

who

modern

looks to

the educators of contemporary

joined with Spenser’s:

and “am

'

rais’d,

-’Mary Astell,

An

in

Thus for

rather than ancient poets as

women,

Milton’s voice

is

con-

reverence the Fairy Queen," she says,

“I

and elevated with Paradise Lost ."'

Essay

[49]

De fence

o f the

2

If

Milton

Female Sex (London, 1696),

sits

50; a

p.

second edition appeared in the same year, a third in 1697, and a fourth in 1721. Lucy Aikin remarks upon Addison’s linking the names of Spenser and Milton in

The Life of Addison (2 vols.; London, mon. See, e.g., Letters of Anna Seward:

38-39. This linkage is comWritten Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (6 vols.; Edinburgh, 1811), I, 378; II, 308; VI, 27, 28. See also “Moral Sketches or Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic,” in The Works of Hannah More (1 1 vols.; London, 1830), IV, 341. Historically, the comparison worked to Milton’s advantage, but in our own century F. R. Leavis and Maureen Quilligan have turned the same comparison to Spenser’s advantage. See F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Devlopment in English Poetry (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), p. 36; and Maureen Quilligan, Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983). There Quilligan contends, “Spenser distinctly indicates that women belong to his readership; Milton, though less obviously, appears to rule them out” (p. 41), or later, “Spenser overtly 18431?!),

I,

and Milton covertly address the female reader and their political intentions Milton casts out a type of inspiration at the same time that he casts are clear. out a type of reader. His casting out is, finally, crucially political” (pp. 179, 221). Cf., with all the above, “Spenser and Milton held essentially the same views on sex and women” (see Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature [Seattle: Univ. Of Washington Press, 1966], p. 138), and with Quilligan’s argument, cf. Stevie Davies, The Feminine Redeemed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 175-247. On Spenser’s feminism, see also James Norris, Haec & Hie; or, The Feminine Gender More Worthy Than the Masculine (London, 1683). In view of Rogers’ surmise that Spenser and Milton alike acquiesced in and would advance Renaissance commonplaces, it is important to observe that historically both poets were sorted not with the Constitutionalists or Legitimators but with the Revolutionists. They “were not so properly Constitutional as their great compeers,” nor were they like the new breed of Legitimators, such as rather resemble Cowley, Waller, Dryden, and Pope: “Spenser and Milton the framers of ideal common-wealths, than citizens of any actually existing state. but an abstraction, an Apotheosis of nature. They do not represent nature, Yet they are by no means alike. Milton is the most ideal, Spenser the most visionary of poets. Neither of them was content with the world as he found it: but Spenser presents you with a magic picture to exclude it from your sight, Milton produces a pattern to mend it by. After labouring in vain to stamp perfection on an earthly republic, he embodied it in a new world of Gods and God-like men. His ideals seem more substantial than any reality. He rouses the mind to .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

more than common wakefulness, while Spenser enchants it dream” (see “On Parties in Poetry,” Literary Chronicle, 100 476).

into an Elysian (

1

4 April

1

82

1

,

Feminist Milton

[50]

on the margins of this debate

in his

own

century, he

moves

to

its

center in the eighteenth century. It

should be remembered,

as

it

was well

into the nineteenth

century, that in 1699 John Hopkins turned Paradise Lost that paradoxically restores Paradise

— into rhyme, put Hercules into poem

nizing the

only

epic, but

as a

by

petticoats as

it

poem

a

was

to touch Milton’s

In his apologetic preface,

Hopkins

says he has “throwfnl off the Lyon’s Skin, and put the soft parell

on the whole,” admitting

of Rhyme” but implying that the male

drawn by

.

women

always prefer to

readers,

who

will be

“Gawdy dress” with which Hopkins’ “Effeminate now garbed Milton’s poem. In Hopkins’ words, Para-

dise Lost, “like the .

elect will

the

Fancy” has

.

Ap-

Milton “disdained the Chain

that

“Look on Mr. Milton Plain,” unlike

lost

were, thus femi-

it

way of allowing women

at a distance.

how

telling

—

who would

Tree of Knowledge,

is

Forbidden to the Ladies,

Tast the Apples, but care not for Climbing the

Bough.” 13 Hopkins

suggests, moreover, that there

may

be un-

spoken reasons for devising a rhymed text, a special text for women, which will deny them full access to Milton’s poem. For example, in Hopkins’ imitation of Book IX, in defiance of Milton’s text where Satan plays Delilah to Samson-like

Adam

and Eve, Eve becomes Delilah enticing her Samson-like husband, and thereupon blame for the fall is affixed to Eve: Thus Adam her, and She did Adam blame. Hence it appears her Sex does Nothing 111 Their crime is charg’d on their Accuser still, ,

And

the Wife blames the

Man who

Indeed, Hopkins’ attitude toward

tuous than that of John Sprint,

mon Iliad

by

who

should restrain her Will. 14

women

is

no

less

contemp-

also in 1699 published a ser-

own

admission had already provoked “a whole of female Objections.” Sprint’s theme is that man is ruined that

his

and undone by

l3

John Flopkins,

women — by

her indiscretions and

Milton’s “Paradise Lost ” Imitated

in

follies, obsti-

Rhyme (London,

1699),

The Minor, 16 (1830), 428. Hopkins, Milton’s “Paradise Lost” Imitated in Rhyme, pp. 54, 56. See also the brilliant forthcoming essay by Mary Nyquist, “Textual Overlapping and DeliPreface; see also “C.P.,” “Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” 14

lah’s Harlot-lap.”

Milton’s Early Female Readership

[51]

—

nancy and stubbornness and so the bridegroom is instructed that he must hold her in check, keep her in subjection and teach her obedience, in part because women possess “weaker Capacils ties to learn than Men.” Sprint does no more here than summarize attitudes toward women that women themselves were busy lamenting. In the words of one of them: It

is

Reason

as

A

...

Women

endoued with such Men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they

verily believed

.

.

.

that

Woman

are not

Comet, that bodes Mischief, whenever it appears. To offer to the World the liberal Education for Women is to deface the Image of God in Man, it will make Women so high, and men so low, like Fire in the Housetop it will set the whole world in a Flame. 16 are.

learned

is

thought to be

a

Lady Mary Chudleigh is particularly zealous in defending women and advocating their rights. Wanting to dispose once and for

all

owing

of Sprint’s (the Parson’s) belief that

men’s hardships are

all

—

England “Poets of our own” who with “good Sense’’ and “Elevation of Thought” would silence “the invenom’d Tongues” of such ad17 versaries. And it is clear from Chudleigh’s pseudonymously authored tract of 1699 that the poet she has chiefly in mind is to Eve, she argues that there are poets in

—

Milton,

poet

a

woman

to

who would

because he

is

the

dispel the notion that first

created and a poet

point of view, understood fully that cial help,

not

a servile

John

remarks

Sprint,

woman was

is

superior

who, from her

created as “a so-

one”:

There are some Divines that tell us, World God proceeded from the less

15

man

that in the

to the

frame of this lower

more

perfect;

and there-

The Bride-Womans Counsellor (London, 1699), pp. 3-4. Griffin

when anonymous poem, The Court of Adultery: A Vision, took its epigraph from Adam’s reproach ‘the fair defect / Of nature’” (Griffin, Regaining Paradise, p. that this misogynistic tradition remains alive “as late as 1778,

an

.

.

.

does not acknowledge the extent to which

127). Griffin

this tradition, in the

course of the eighteenth century, comes increasingly under challenge with Milton himself providing much of the heavy artillery. 16

Bathshua Makin (1673), as quoted by Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 191 17

-

Lady Mary Chudleigh, The

Answered (London, 1701),

last

Ladies Defense;

or,

page of dedicatory

The Bride-Woman’s Counsellor

epistle.

Feminist Milton

[52]

upon, according to them, the Woman’s being created be

a

last will

not

very great argument to debase the dignity of the Female Sex.

some of the Men do own Great Milton,

a

this,

’

tis

the

more

very grave Author, brings in

Eve, in his Paradise Lost,

thus speaking to

lib. 9.

O fairest o f Creation! Of all

The

likely to be true:

Adam

If

last

and

best

God’s Works .' 8

Not all women are always elevated by the Miltonic example, as Mary Astell makes clear. If sometimes she admits to revering Milton, other times she opines: “Patience and Submission are the

only Comforts that are

left to a

poor People,

Tyranny, unless they are Strong enough

Not

Milton himself

would cry up

who

groan under

to break the

liberty to

Yoke.

poor Female

or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private

.

.

.

Slaves,

Tyranny .”

19

dismayed because Milton, a libertarian in so many other respects, would submit to cultural predisposition and prejudice in this respect. Too many of “our Christian Brethren are ... of the Turks opinion, That Women have no Souls,” Astell will later lament, and within a context making clear that there is too often a “Clog of the Mind” which conceals the fact that “women may put on the whole Armour of GOD without degeneration into a Masculine Temper” as Deborah and Esther did, exhibiting greater “Heroic Fortitude” than those “Mighy Men who went before.” It is a clog of the mind which causes both women’s education and women’s history to be slighted, even though it is “the great Design of Christianity” for women to advance “to the utmost degree of Perfection of which Human Nature is capable.” “[T]o what study shall we apply ourselves?” Astell asks: Astell

is

Some Men

say that Heraldry

this reason,

I

is

suppose, That she

a pretty

Study for

may know how

to

a

Woman,

for

Blazon her Lord

and Maker’s great Achievements! They allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances, to divert us and themselves; and when they would ex-

ln

Lady Mary Chudleigh,

Female Preacher. Being an Answer to a Late Rude and Scandalous Wedding-Sermon (London, 1699), p. 9; see also The Female Advocate (London, 1700), p. 21. 'The

''Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage Occasion’d by of Magazine’s Case (London, 1700), pp. 28-29.

the

Duke

&

Duchess

Milton’s Early Female Readership

Esteem

press a particular

Womans

for a

History; tho' with Submission,

Amusement and the

Men who

govern

Acted, yet what Business?

Affairs,

this to us,

is

History can only serve us for

to

who

Some good Examples

Conduct, or excite

in us a

it

know how

may

be of Use to

their Fore-fathers

have nothing to do with such

indeed are to be found

bad are ten for one; but

tho’ generally the

recommend

sense, they

Subject of Discours. For tho’

a

[53]

how

in

History,

will this help

our

Men

be-

generous Emulation? since the

ing the Historians, they seldom condescend to record the great and

good Actions of Women; and when they take notice of them, tis with this wise Remark, That such Women acted above their sex. By which one must suppose they would have their Readers understand, That they were not women who did those Great Actions, but they were Men in Petticoats! 20 ’

Maureen Quilligan’s recent argument notwithstanding, Milton will seem an advance upon Spenser, and an advance too upon earlier male historians who omit from the record In this respect,

the history Milton records through his representation of Eve.

not Milton but Spenser

woman who

make

will

who

It is

subscribes to the dictum “Every

herself male will enter the

Kingdom of

Heaven .” 21 This theme will be pressed in The Ladies Library, probably written by Mary Wray and published in 1714. The three-volume collection is “inclined to such Enquiries as by general Custom [the female] sex is debarr’d from” and intended to redress the injustice resulting from “shutting] Books of Knowledge from the .

Women,”

Eyes* of .

Verses of his against

context that

first

but

its

.

.

index directs attention to “Milton,

Women.” Yet those verses

chastises certain

are printed within a

of Milton’s

characters for

what

they say, and then questions whether Milton’s sentiments are to

be identified with

theirs:

turned over some Musing one Day in the Tract of Thought, written by the polite Writers of the Age, and began to Books consider what Account they gave of our Composure, different I

.

.

.

The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London, 1705), pp- 104, 275, 292-93, 296, 354. 2l The Gospel of Thomas, as quoted by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), P- 4920

Mary

Astell,

Feminist Milton

[54]

from

that

of the other Sex. But indeed, when

Writings [of Otway, Milton, and Dryden],

from

lieved

many of

could not have be-

general and undistinguished Aspersions that

their

these

I

dipped into those

I

Men

had such Relatives

as

Mothers, Wives and

Sisters.

These verses from Book thereupon printed:

X

of Paradise Lost

Thy

All

is

Rather than solid Virtue;

but

all

Shew

a

but

883—96) are

(lines

a Rib,

Crooked by Nature. Oh! why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven With

Spirits masculine, create at last

This Novelty on Earth? This

Of Nature,

and not

With Men,

as Angels,

Or

find

fill

the

fair

World

defect at

once

without Feminine,

some other way

to generate

Mankind?

But the verses are printed with this caveat: “It may be said that there is something perhaps in the Character of those that speak, which would circumstantiate the thing so as not to make it a Reproach upon Women as such.” The verses are also printed with the proviso that French writers are far worse than English authors in the contempt they register for the female sex. 22 Amid these reflections on what Milton’s attitude toward women ac.

tually

is,

women

there

is

the suspicion that even if he

his defense

sufficient to allow

does not go

women (Anne

far

enough.

is

a

Still,

.

.

defender of

his defense

is

Finch, Countess of Winchilsea,

good example) to cast their own hopes in Miltonic dreams and to fire them in the desire for a partner suited to their minds. Milton’s Eve is enabling for women, a figure through whom

is

a

they can advance and

whom

they can use to benefit their

own

po-

lemical positions.

The debate would now break

in

one of two ways. Either the

contempt registered by Milton’s characters is in fact Milton’s contempt, thoroughly supportable by biblical teaching and 22

See

Mary Wray, The

1714), sig.

Bb2, pp.

1,

Ladies Library.

2, 4;

Written by a

Lady

(3

vols.;

London,

other editions appeared in 1722, 1732, and 1751.

”

Milton’s Early Female Readership

[55]

Christian tradition, or Milton, not to be confused with his characters,

contemptuous of the commonplaces

quietly

is

speeches enfold. Either Milton sentation of

women,

or he

is

is

a

revolutionary, even in his repre-

spokesperson for orthodoxy,

conventional representations of

mony

their

women

providing both

his

testi-

and proof of that orthodoxy. The debate breaks in one of these two ways, but it should be noted that Milton’s female for

readership sponsors the former proposition, and his male reader-

most

There are exceptions of course, perhaps the most notable (and most unexpected) of which ship, for the

is

part, presses the latter.

Richard Bentley. His notes strewn with Milton-must-have-meant-arguments

intended to justify his

mant

own

textual emendations, Bentley

is

ada-

contention that Milton must have meant to champion

in his

Thus Bentley appends to the line “Hee God in him” (IV. 299), this note:

the equality of the sexes. for

God

A

only, shee for

shameful error to have pass’d through

thor gave

all

the Editions.

The

it,

He for God

only,

She for God and Him.

The opposition demonstrates this; and IV. 440. Eve speaks Adam, O Thou for whom And from whom was form’d. .

.

au-

to

I

.

Moreover, when Bentley

emends Adam’s description of the to read “owr Song” instead of “my

later

Morning Hymn in Book V Song” (my italics), he also remarks, “It cannot displease, that I have given the Mother of Mankind her Share in this fine Piece, and not let her stand mute, a Hearer only.” 23 Swayed by the poof Milton’s female readership, Bentley gives textual authority as a spur to their arguments, and he does so in an edition that was both prompted and promoted by Queen Caroline.

sitions

The same

sort

from Milton’s

of arguments that

text

women

were

now

unpacking

and that Newton’s mid-century edition

at-

“Richard Bentley, Milton’s ‘‘Paradise Lost (London, 1732), pp. 117, 153. See also Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry p. 29. The construction placed upon this crucial line by Diane Kelsey McColley (“Both are images of God, but she is also an image of Adam”) seems to be perfectly in accord with the way the line was read by Milton’s early female and sympathetic male readerships; see McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 89. ,

Feminist Milton

[56]

tempted

posed by Jane

poems

of Paradise Lost com-

to silence lurk within the imitations

Adams

(1734). Archibald

two

are divided into

Cauford explains

that her

second Part being blank

parts, “the

Verse, in Imitation of the famous Milton, his incomparable and unparalelled

Paradise lost and regain’d.

[sic]

are fast fixed to the Edenic

the

titles

” 24

Jane Adams’ eyes

books of Paradise Lost

as

,

is

revealed in

she gives her imitations: “Adam’s First Reflections

“On

Himself,”

upon upon

End of Creation,” “Adam’s Reflections “Reflections on Divine Wisdom,” “Adam’s Reflec-

His Soul,”

the

on His Own Creation,” “Adam on the Formation of Eve,” “Adam’s First Address to Eve,” “The First Temptation,” “The Trial of Adam,” “The Trial of Eve,” “The Sentence Past on the Serpent,” “The Sentence Past on Eve,” “The Sentence Past on Adam,” “A Triumph Sung by Eve,” “Reflections on the Fall.” The last of these imitations shows that, for Adams, Milton’s story of losing Paradise is really about its recovery. Other imitations make it clear that Eve, like Adam, is “a Ray of divine Light” (both from the same “Origin did descend”); that they are tions

.

.

.

of praise and together ruling over “Earth, and Air, and Sea”; that Eve’s “low Subjection” after

equals, together fashioning songs

the Fall the

Eve

is

Adam

not to

but to God; and

Son taking the scepter from will reign.

retire.

As

Adam

says,

that, in exact parallel to

his Father, if

“Thou

shalt as

Adam now

reigns,

Regent reign when

I

” 25

draw

if to

women

sharp line between Adam’s railing against

a

after the Fall

ments, Jane

Adams

Book X. 883 -85

—

and Milton’s

own more

generous senti-

transposes as she transforms the lines from

was but a shew / Rather then solid vertue, all but a Rib / Crooked by nature” making them a part of Adam’s supposed and supposedly more accurate initial reflections on Eve: “all

Surpriz’d was

—

Form, So like my Self in Feature, Shape and Mein: But she indeed seem’d far more delicate But when resolv’d to be convinc’d by Touch, I

to see so fair a

.

''Archibald Cauford, in his preface to Jane

gow, 1734), sig. A v see also pp. 136-63. Adams, Miscellany Poems, pp. 144, 145. ;

2

155.

Adams,

.

.

Miscellany Poems (Glas-

Milton’s Early Female Readership

I

found her solid Substance, not

I

read the

Law of Honour

a

shade

.

.

[

57

1

.

in her Eyes,

The sum of which was Divine Gratitude, Which far outshines all her exteriour Charms. 20

Most

telling

over, even

of all

if

there

is is

that the

now

a

triumph song is Eve’s song. Moretriumph for woman recognized and

won within Milton’s poem, there will soon be another sort of triumph scored by her within the interpretive history of Paradise Lost. It is prepared for by the likes of William Smith, who observes that

“

Adam and Eve

in

Milton are the finest Picture of

conjugal Love that ever was drawn. In them

is

true

Affection without the violence or fury of Passion;

a

warmth of sweet and

reasonable Tenderness without any cloying or insipid Fondness.”

2

When

in

poem

1745 the

is

by a “thorough Under-

translated into prose

Gentleman of Oxford, this time to bring a standing” of “those most instructive Passages” within the reach of common readers, the always problematic passage from Book IV is rendered thus: “In their divine Looks shone the Image of their glorious Maker He was form’d for Valour and Con.

.

.

:

templation, she for softness and sweet attractive Grace; he

GOD,

but she for

GOD

and him.”

2*

for

Bentley’s emendation has

taken hold; throughout the century, in the service of the cause of

women, it will be repeated Eliza Haywood’s Female

often.

Spectator (1745) piles citation

tation to seventeenth-century poets

—

upon

ci-

— Herbert, Suckling, Waller,

but it is the citations from Milton which Cowley, and Dryden confirm her argument that “those Perfections which constitute a true Magnanimity, are not confined to the Male Gender.” For a male readership, Milton may be a left-handed poet who darkens all his seeming compliments to women with gall, but for a female readership, such as represented by Haywood, Milton is ready to repair woman’s defective education. This is evident when Eve withdraws from the discussion between Adam and Raphael only so “that she might afterwards hear it from her Husband.” Mil-

26

Ibid., p. 143.

27

William Smith, Longinus on

28

77ie State of Innocence:

And

(London, 1745), Preface, and

p.

Sublime (London, 1739), p. 136. Fall of Man. Described in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” the

150

(my

italics).

Feminist Milton

[58]

Adam

and Eve delight in conversation with one another, and they are jointly the masterwork of creation and exemplify the perfect marriage. Through his depiction of Eve, Milton portrays ton’s

woman

with

in her true aspect,

Haywood

herself

now

quoting

the oft-cited lines:

Grace was In

all

in all her steps,

Heaven

in her Eyes:

29 her motions Dignity and Love.

Lady Mary Wortley Montague had spoken early (in 1717) of the “majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother,” a Milton who from her point of view is committed to freeing poetry of its “Monkish Chain” and to “reforming] the taste of a degenerate Age.” 30 Similarly, an anonymous reviewer of George Graham’s Telemachus: A Mask insists that Milton’s portrait of Eve in Paradise Lost “gives a

new and more

delightful aspect to the

creation.” 31 If

we

can believe Margaret Collier, writing to Samuel Richard-

son (11 February 1756), Milton did not wish to consign women to “a state of submission and acquiescence, ” he did not mean for

them for,

“to enter into a state of vilest servitude.

and perversion

of,

of wives rivaling their

”

God’s creation, which

own

That

is

Satan's plan

men who

are afraid

understanding and perhaps “outshin-

ing themselves” are appropriating. 32

Women

readers

were

in-

haling Milton’s revolutionary spirit not just from the poetry but also

from

his prose, the

pages of which, according to their male

counterparts, are but an exhalation of “bad air.” 33 Yet

Milton’s regard for tracts, that

women, sometimes

was

evident in the divorce

allowed for the wicked Eve of Milton’s male reader-

ship to be transformed into

-'Eliza

it

Haywood, The Female

IV, 73; see also II, 250-51. v ’The Complete Letters of Lady

Lady Bradshaigh’s “Poor Eve,”

Spectator (4 vols.;

Mary

London,

1745),

II,

a

90, 249;

Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (2 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, 314; see also “Her Palace Placed Beneath a Muddy Road,” in Essays and Poems and Simplicity: A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isabel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 248. "The Monthly Review, 28 (1763), 109. i2 Sec The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (6 vols.; London, 1804), II, 97-98. "Aaron Hill to Samuel Richardson (1 June 1730), in ibid., I, 2. vols.;

Milton’s Early Female Readership

woman who

[59]

meant no harm to Adam, intending only “to impart the knowledge she had imbibed,” and who was tempted supernaturally whereas he was tempted naturally. Such a defense of Eve elicits from Richardson the response “Eve beguiled Adam, clearly

out of love to him!” 34 It

can

now

be said that

“man

is

the serpent of deceit, and

woman is the daughter of Eve,” or women can argue in their own behalf: “ Eve was not created after Adam but was formed out ,

of one of

his Ribs; agreed,

Adam was made of Clay

—

is

that a

Reason that Clay was more noble than him? Eve was formed of one of Adam’s Ribs to teach them they should go Hand in Hand, and by side of each other.” The Miltonic image is revelatory and would seem to place Milton apart from the poets and or.

.

.

ators here chided for “attributing] the Vices of

Women

some

particular

whole Sex, and Virtues of some individual Men to 35 the masculine Creation.” Such a mind-set, it is argued, nur-

all

to the

tures the prejudices that eventuate in error.

Female Conduct (1759), Thomas Marriott rises up as if a witness to the adage that the dragon rages within the bigot’s breast. In

Aware of the widespread feeling that Paradise Lost courts the favor of women, and taking Andrew Marvell for his guide, Marriott enrolls

Milton

in the tablets

of tradition and

Lost as a prophetical looking-glass

on modern

love of card

games and public assemblies,

to domestic

life.

Milton’s

allegiance to male detail.*

poem

is

enlists Paradise

women — their

their alleged aversion

ransacked for evidence of his

supremacy without much care

Thus Marriott speaks of “the

for precision

Vision, presented to

of

Adam

Angel Gabriel, of the Antidiluvian female Assemblies” as “a Type of our modern Drums, Routs, Hurricanes, and Masquerades in London ,” quoting the following lines (614-20) from Book XI, but emending “female troop” to “female trap”:

•by the

For that

fair

female Trap, thou saw’st, that seem’d

Of Goodness,

so blith, so smooth, so gay;

^Ibid., VI, 214, 215, 222.

The Whole Duty of a Woman. By a Lady [William Kenrick] (London, 1753) p. 41; by 1797 there are thirteen editions of this work. And see also the anonymous Female Rights Vindicated; or, The Equality of the Sexes Morally and V Physically Proved (London, 1758), sigs. A3~A3 and p. 44. 35

See, e.g.,

Feminist Milton

[6o]

Yet empty of all Good, wherein consists

Woman’s domestic Honor, and chief Praise; Made only, and compleated to the Taste

Of lustful

Appetence, to sing, to dance,

To

and

dress,

troll

the

Tongue, and

the Eye.

roll

These lines provoke Marriott into observing, “Such were the female Assemblies, that preceded the drowning of the world, and such very probably will be found, at the Conflagration of it; these modern Assemblies have likely introduced much Gaming, Vice, and Luxury into our great Metropolis, and thereby much contributed to the present Corruption of our Morals, and Principals.”

The problem

not so

lies

much

in that

female education

“shameful Neglect” but rather, says Marriott, an “improper Turn

.

.

.

from whence many Evils

Nation.” All the calamities of war,

this

in that

all

is

has taken

it

are derived to

debauchery,

all

cor-

women, and

ruption of manners, Marriott thinks, derive from

in

he

thinks too that Milton believes this also. For Marriott, Paradise Lost,

with

its

Who

vast design,

is

preeminently the story of Eve’s

reads lost Paradise,

all

knowledge gains

.

.

Heav’n above, and Earth beneath There you, the Charms of Innocence, may see, How lovely Eve, in State of Purity! But how deform’d, how all her Graces fade, All things, in

By

Sin expell’d,

Marriott believes

of female beauty

from Eden’s

who

exalts the deeds

ness, especially in the

women’s

of

.

.

to heroic pro-

corruption, their secondari-

from pure Motives, flow.” 37 is

.

Spenser (the poet

women

Edenic books, where

tion Marriott’s beliefs, Marvell

.

Shade! 36

that, in contradistinction to

portion), Milton reveals

Virtues,

blissful

fall:

If

we

see

Milton

is

“how seldom used to sanc-

used to authorize Marriott’s in-

poem emerges poem on Paradise

terpretation of Milton’s beliefs. Marriott’s entire as a

Lost

resounding echo of Marvell’s dedicatory

— and not just an echo,

^Thomas

it

observes in

its

smallest particu-

Marriott, Female Conduct: Being an Essay on the Art of Pleasing (Lon-

don, 1759), pp. xxiv-xxv, 85-86. 37

for

Ibid., pp.

10- 1

1.

Milton’s Early Female Readership

pattern of Marvell’s

poem

[61]

seeming conservatism of his interpretation, with the superimposition of Marriott's own antifeminist accents. The vehemence of Marriott’s attack on women, and his insistence that he is joining with Milton, indeed with the venerable tradition of Christianity, in lars the

launching that attack

— both

may

against the popular culture and less

as well as the

its

be seen

as

an

move

elitist

Milton. In Marriott’s poem, no

than in Newton’s variorum edition of Paradise Lost the ,

dominant culture

rises

up,

though

tardily

now

and ineffectually,

against the Milton of various countercultures.

Edward It

Said writes: “Culture has always involved hierarchies.

has separated the

best,

and so

forth.

elite

It

from the popular, the

has always

made

thought prevail over others. But

move downward from 38

The dominant

attempts to impose

its

certain styles

from the

less

and modes of

tendency has always been to

its

the height of power and privilege in order

to diffuse, disseminate, range.’’

best

and expand

itself in the

widest possible

culture of the eighteenth century

Milton on the popular culture, but

now

this at-

tempt meets powerful resistance and for a time is defeated. During the 1760s, the Milton of popular culture and of his female readership begins to prevail, certainly in part because of the grip of a woman’s Milton on that culture and because of the accessibility and intelligibility given to Paradise Lost through the evangelizwho if he “saved us from the total ing efforts of John Wesley

—

of Christian principles and vital religion’’ did so in part by wresting his principles of religion from Milton’s poetry now 34 Wesley’s Milton is the prophetic cleared of allegorical mists.

loss

Milton accommodated to ordinary readers through abridgment, involving the deletion of difficult (that

is,

mythologically dense)

passages, and through a system of annotation, “mak[ing] the

Poem, clear and intelligible to any uneducated Person, of tolerably good Understanding.” The effect of excising classical mythology is to make of Paradise Lost an even more profoundly Christian poem with a still more powerful promain of this

excellent

411

^Edward

Said,

The World,

vard Univ. Press, 1983), p. 39 SeeJane West, Letters to

the Text,

and

the Critic

(Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

9.

a

Young Lady (Troy and

New

York, 1806),

p. 156.

^John Wesley, An Extract from Milton’s “ Paradise Lost" with Notes (London 1791), sig. A2. The Preface is dated 1 January 1763.

Feminist Milton

[62]

phetic casting, and to rivet attention, through the fullness of their representation, to

Books

IV, VI, VII, VIII, XI, and XII. If these

books are unexpectedly complete in their representation, Books I, V, IX, and X are curiously lean in Wesley’s contraction of them. Nor was Wesley’s effort to turn Milton into the poet of the common people, and to make Paradise Lost the cornerstone of their education, without success. In 1762 William Dodd’s Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton appeared, the notes of which “refer not to Paradise Lost only, but to all Milton's poetical Works” and are intended therefore to bring Milton’s poetry generally within the under-

standing of

“common

Readers.” This volume, addressed to par-

youth of the nation, and especially young women, contends that “the fair Sex in particular will receive great Advantage from [Paradise Lost]” and that “with the fair Sex Milton can never fail to be a Favourite,” presumably because of the high estimate his poem places on women. 41 In the same year, there also appeared The Poetical Miscellany, a volume likewise directed at the youth of the nation, especially at young gentlemen, with the express intention of “impressing upon their Minds many no-

ents, the

.

.

.

.

ble Sentiments

subjects.”

42

Of

upon some of

the noblest and

.

.

most important

the fifty pages devoted to Milton, forty-five are

devoted to Paradise Lost and

five to Paradise Regained.

ary quality of the brief epic

is

regard to Paradise Lost

it

is

The

vision-

here gathered into focus, but with the battle in heaven that

is

fore-

grounded: ten pages (97-107) include excerpts from Books I-V, followed by twenty pages (107-26) excerpted from Book VI and finally

another eighteen pages (126-43) of selected passages from

"William Dodd, don, 1762), pp. iii,

A vi,

Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (Lonvii. See also Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Po-

etry, p. 25. 42

The Poetical Miscellany, Consisting of Select Pieces for the Use of Schools v (London, 1762), sig. Az-A2 Cf. The Beauties of Milton (Dublin, 1783), which is presented “to the rising youth of both sexes” (Preface; my italics) for the cultivation of their knowledge and the improvement of their morals. Excerpts from Paradise Lost are printed on pp. 12-97, with those from Book VI reporting the celestial battle (presumably for the edification of young men) running on pp. 44-62; but the number of pages reporting on Adam and Eve in Paradise is here greatly expanded, with a special accent now falling on “Eve’s Ascendency over .

.

Adam”

(p. 84).

.

.

Milton’s Early Female Readership

[63]

Books VII through XII. In these pages, however, it is the story of Adam and Eve that receives attention. If, as this example would indicate, Book VI is the privileged book for young men, the Edenic books are given special emphasis when the poem’s audience is reconceived to include young women, as in James Buchanan’s edition of 1773, The First Six Books

of Milton's Paradise Lost,

This volume

struction.

is

Rendered

pitched to “the capacities of ordinary

young gentlemen then

readers,” to the

Grammatical Con-

into

in school, for Milton’s

poem, more than those by Homer or Virgil, “exhibits a view of everything great in the whole circle of Being,” and besides “would wonderfully open the capacity, improve the judgment, elevate the idea, [and] refine the imagination.” But, says Buchanan, especially this volume is directed to “Our Ladies, for whose interest

.

.

[Milton] professes

.

a

very great regard.” 43 In

this

prose translation of Milton’s epic, Buchanan’s ultimate objective is

to liberate the

poem from

the grammatical errors and misinter-

pretations of earlier editors; a striking example of what he regards their errors to

God

be

is

evident in his rendering of Milton’s line “Hee

God

him” (IV. 299), in imitation of Richard Bentley, as: “He was for God only; she was formed for God and him.” 44 Also, in 1779, John Rice, whose special concern is with “the improvement of Ladies in their earlifor

est years”

shee

only,

in

and with “the Cultivation of

ING,” 45 advances program,

for

Paradise Lost as a crucial text in the educational

text that rids the

a

UNDERSTAND-

their

modes of thinking and

mind of

prejudices and

that, likewise inspiring the

wrong

mind, both

-improves understanding and perfects judgment. For Rice, Milton is

the

crowning author and

Paradise Lost

is

the capstone in female

education. Milton thus secures his standing as a principal contrib-

utor to

women’s

cultivation and as the poet of Eden,

the idealism of the sexes uniting and

43

James Buchanan, The

who

becoming “one

fosters

one

life,

Six Books of Milton’s “ Paradise Lost," Rendered Grammatical Construction (Edinburgh, 1773), pp. 1-2. First

into

“Ibid., p. 257.

A

Female Education (London, 1779), pp. 5, 23-24, and Female Education (Loncsp. Rice’s Lecture on the Improvement and Necessity of don, 1773), pp. 37-38, 40-41. See also Critical Review, 36 (1773), 78. 4S

John Rice,

Plan

for

.

.

.

Feminist Milton

[64]

one soul.” 46 The gradual opening of Milton’s text to a female readership, then, produces a new set of premises for reading his poetry, and in thus altering the horizon of expectations concerning Milton it produces an important ideological shift in criti-

heart,

cism: Paradise Lost

women,

now that

is

but to prevent

written not to promote self-loathing in

Quotations from Milton’s writings can

it.

be used, as they are by

women would

teach to

Ann Murry, to epitomize the lessons other women, and even when admit-

had to be conceded that, besides subverting monarchy, Milton “helped ... to destroy subordination, ted to disapprovingly,

and to

level

Witness,

all

it

distinctions of rank.”

Elizabeth

first,

Montagu

47

in a letter to Elizabeth

widow of

writing tongue-in-cheek one supposes, about the

ter,

Car-

Charles Dunbar as “ye perfection of ye female character; form’d to

domestick

I

situation,

really believe she

&

disposed to obedience”:

was just

like

Eve before she

eat ye apple; at least

she answers to Miltons description of her. She her Husbands discourse to ye Angels.

am

afraid

have preferred

you

&

my

I,

dear

should have enter’d into some metaphysical disquisitions

friend,

we

with ye Angel,

ought

to be.

When

a

early

I

wd

We

Wife,

Youth

I

are not so perfectly ye rib of

can think for ourselves,

was obedient because

a direction

extensive; but

it

seems

perhaps to

me

is

it

&

was

necessary

that a

new

Man

as

Woman

also act for ourselves.

my

if the

duty

.

.

.

,

and

in

sphere of action

Master, and

new

is

lessons,

& habits were form’d,

must be a little awkward, & with all due respect to ye superior Sex, I do not see how they can be necessary to a Woman unless she were to defend her Lands & Tenements by sword or gun. after

The

ones opinions

real ideal

lated in a letter

of

woman

of 1786,

is

(and of man) for Montagu, as formuafforded by her friend Dr. Young,

who

both “On the Cultivation of Taste,” in The Lady’s Preceptor; or, Entertaining Guide to Politeness and Virtue (London, 1790), p. 199, and also the Lady’s Poetical Magazine; or, Beauties of British Poetry (4 vols.; London, 1781), I, 69. In “The Progress of Poetry,” printed in this collection, Mrs. Madan celebrates Milton as the poet of Eden: “Eden’s delights! which thou alone couldst ‘“’See

These four volumes are a particularly useful guide to how Milton was represented to, and by, women. 47 See Ann Murry, Mentoria; or, The Young Ladies Instructor, 4th ed. (London, 1785), p. 54; the first edition of this work appeared in 1776. See also Thomas Warton, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1785), p. 95. sing”

(I,

140).

Milton’s Early Female Readership

[65]

of an androgynous Milton possesses the spirit of a superior being with thoughts “ above ye visible diurnal sphere ” and thus the capacity for “conversation neither of ye male nor fe48 male Gender.”

in the posture

.

Witness both

.

.

Mary O’Brien and Jane Cave. For O’Brien,

the passage cited earlier,

women

swallow

are better advised to

than stumble over Milton, and she adds that his Paradise Lost unveiling of truths Scriptures tell.” 49 acters say

still

hidden

in Scripture:

is

is

an

“Milton writes, and

The discrepancy between what

and what Milton himself thinks

in

now

Milton’s charso

much

a part

of the female consciousness that Jane Cave can quietly appropriate the words of the fallen Adam, while transforming them in such

a

way

as to exalt rather

than excoriate the female sex. Extol-

worth of her sex by representing women as the stable center of man’s fluctuating mind, Cave contends that the worth

ling the

of her sex,

woman’s

“brightest ornament,” resides in

its

capacity

sound judgment, solid sense, / And virtue, with noble sense; / An humble, generous, face, exalted

for “retain[ing] religion’s

mind,

/

becomes

From

all

the grosser sentiments refin’d.” 50

a foil for the heroic

and woman’s mind the

Eve of the

seat

Adam

here

books of Paradise Lost, of the new paradise promised by last

Michael.

Witness further the more complicated,

and complicating,

example of Hannah More, who speaks glowingly of Milton’s daughters without demeaning their father, as was then customary among male readers, and who draws many of her ideas concerning the education of young women from Milton’s poetry and prose writings alike. Though “a party man,” Milton was still “an ardent champion of liberty” who, in poetry, subdued the excesses of his prose without eliminating altogether a certain “political stroke.” Close your Byron and open your Milton, More will

young women can quote impiand infidel poet. But from the

eventually say, as she laments that eties 48

cal

from

this “profligate

.

.

.

—

Ewert, Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter: Literary Gossip and CritiOpinions from the Pen of the Queen of the Blues (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. MiSee

L.

crofilms International, 1977), pp. 168, 185. 49 Mary O’Brien, The Pious Incendiaries: or, Fanaticism Display’d.

A

don, 1785), P- 53 ^Jane Cave, Poems on Various Subjects (Bristol, 1786), p. 15. The was published in 1783 and revised in 1786; a second edition appeared

Poem (Lon-

-

a fourth in 1794, reissued the

following year.

first

edition

in 1789,

and

Feminist Milton

[66]

same fair lips, we hear little of Milton,” although it is in Milton’s Eve that they might find their most “finished picture” and from Paradise Lost that they

might learn of the

special excellences

of

both sexes and of their interdependency for improvement. 51 Witness, finally, Lucy Hutton’s Six Sermonicles or Discourses on

Punishment of Eve, written in 1787 just a few months before her death. This volume is founded upon the idea that, in the bethe

power and supremacy were nonexistent: Man and woman were created equal; woman’s subordination to ginning, ideas of male

man is a curse of the Fall. “There are infidels,” says Hutton, “who laugh at the narrative of the fall, and rank it amongst the agreeable fictions of poetry. Laugh on!

but cannot see the joke.”

I

too exercise

From Hutton’s

value for

women.

Milton’s

its

poem

world, the effect of which

human

“reflected

that has a genuinely educative

brings the knowledge, once

confined to academic groves and monastic haunts, to lized

reason,

point of view, “the

fancy of Milton” has produced the one history, with

view of good and bad example,”

my

may

women

all

the civi-

be to “lessen the crimes of

from which our mother fell,” a state of equality with, not subjection to, men. Hutton’s most sustained reflection on Paradise Lost comes as part of her more encompassing reflection on Genesis 3:16, “And he nature” by restoring

shall rule

“to the estate

over thee”:

The other day

was reading the following poem, Paradise Lost, where the poet makes I

lines in that

Adam

sublime

thus discourse

with the angel. “Well

I

understand

Of nature,

outwards

His image

This

is a

home

habit of thinking 5,

the prime end

her the inferior in the

And inward In

is

faculties also,

which most

her resembling

who made

mind excel. less

both.”

upon us: it contradicts my whole But where did Milton find this su-

stroke, indeed,

from infancy.

The Works of Hannah More, VII, i, 64, 300-301, and “Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic,” in ibid., IV, 340-41. See also Appendix D, as well as More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education and her Hints Toward Framing the Character of a Young Princess, both in ibid., V, 10- 1 1; and VI, sig. Az. See Ccelebs

in

Search of a Wife, in

1

Milton’s Early Female Readership

man?

periority for the

[67]

In nature, or in scripture. In fallen nature, let

though many of the learned men have defended our sex, and proved our equality. In scripture did he meet with it? His phaus grant

it:

and no wonder that

natical genius could wrest scripture strangely;

hand which labored to overturn write what he did on divorce. the

.

Adam,

I

.

government, should

regal

.

think, could not well understand this inferiority,

did not exist,

the

till

Heavenly Father denounced

The poet mistakes some

expressions of

which

on Eve. Paul. That Apostle

St.

it

was not ignorant of the time when female subjection commenced. He speaks of man’s being the image and glory of God, but woman the glory of the man: that the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. And tis true, that he would have her keep si’

lence in the assembly, and learn with

But do Moses and

all

subjection.

Paul give different reasons for female sub-

St.

The first tells us it was part of the punishment for the grand offence. The second says, we must be subject, because Adam was first created, then Eve. The animals were made before either.

jection?

.

Good

and

friends

sisters,

bear with

me

But here, as have censured Milton, notice of his angel’s reply to Adam.

tion.

I

may,

my

dry argumenta-

must with justice take

I

cherishing and thy love,

thy subjection.

Then

We

.

no doubt, and worthy well

“Fair

Thy Not

in this

.

value.

sisters,

Weigh with her

thyself,

”

accept

this, either as a

compliment, or

as a

from him; and which he was obliged to acknowledge. The latter part ought to be wrote as a phylactery in let— 52 ters of gold, and tied like a scarf, on the arms of our husbands. truth suddenly stealing

.

With these words, Hutton helps horizon of expectation of

through

how

is

its first

achieved through

Milton and

a set

his Paradise Lost

restore Paradise Lost to the

audience. This critical break-

of implicit premises concerning should be read:

first,

with

a sus-

—

on what is said, and on the poem and its narrative when, why, and by whom, even on what is not said, or said with conflicting signals; second, with another eye on Milton’s quotawith tions, paraphrases, allusions to, and echoes of Scripture picious eye

—

S2

Lucy Hutton, Six

Sermonicles or Discourses on the Punishment of Eve (Kendal,

1788), pp. 13, 22, 83, 85, 87-88.

Feminist Milton

[68]

this

eye on Milton’s translations of Scripture and transgressions

poem

hand and his prose writings, especially the divorce tracts, in the left; and finally, with an intellectual eye beamed on the manifest harmonies between the poet and the political, religious pamphleteer, on the harmonies that may or may not obtain between Milton’s own and a feminist consciousness of women. Where there are, and there inevitably are, discrepancies between these two consciousnesses, they are an occasion not for upbraiding Milton but for owning up

from

it;

third,

with Milton’s

in the right

to the possibility that, as Elaine Pagels explains, “contradictory

toward women reflect a time of social transition,” for distinguishing between the essential and the culturally relative in Paradise Lost and for acknowledging that Milton, like Virginia Mollenkott’s Saint Paul, may be “an honest man in conflict with attitudes

himself.

” 53

Milton could

now

be released from the trap into which Dr.

Johnson had placed him, in his observation that Milton possessed a Turkish contempt for women. As Mary Hays opined, an absurd despotism had come to enslave the female will. “Of all bondage,” she writes, “mental bondage is surely the most fatal.” 54 Yet for Hays it is women who, when they turn their minds to politics, are more uniformly on the side of liberty than the opposite sex and who thus can be counted on to oppose the tyranny of custom; it is women who, as the example of the Lady in Comus shows, are directing their energies toward the pursuit of moral and religious truth. Milton’s poetry was now in process of being realigned with his prose writings in defiance of the eighteenthcentury establishmentarian principle “Milton the poet and Milton the politician were two different men” 55 and in the full understanding that these writings furnish a “fix” on the poetry and on how to read it. Milton’s prose works at once align him with his own contemporary culture and make one ask with what part of his culture

53

he

affiliated.

and Virginia Mollenkott, Women, Men, and the Bible (1977; rpt. Nashville: Abingdon, 1981), p. 104. ^Mary Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London, 1793), P19;

See Pagels, 7 he Gnostic Gospels,

but see also pp.

p.

62,

11, 114.

“Blackburne articulates the commonplace Francis Blackburne (2 vols.; London, 1780),

in

Memoirs of Thomas

II,

509.

Hollis,

comp.

Milton’s Early Female Readership

The

1

69]

feminist consciousness developed during and fully emer-

gent by the end of the eighteenth century had an extraordinary ef-

on how, at the turn into the nineteenth century, Milton was regarded in highbrow and lowbrow culture alike. To acknowledge that Milton had invested his poetry with commonplaces was no longer to say perforce that Milton was a poet of commonplaces. Whatever the literati of the eighteenth century may have thought, Milton’s female readership, burrowing in neglected corners of his poems, comprehended that the intrusions of orthodoxy upon Paradise Lost, especially those pertaining to women, were perhaps a reflex of his class prejudice, or traces of a system that Milton would transcend in a poem that otherwise seemed fect

always

challenge

to

(V. 435 — 36).

That

is,

perspectivism, in is

at

once

would

in

gloss

/

Of

Theologians”

Paradise Lost entered into an essentially anti-

with

thetical relationship

common

“the

its

culture and, in

its

bursting through the repressions

its

nuanced

finely it

inscribes,

league with meaning and in conflict with

neutralize

consciousness.

its critical

all

that

Not only had Milton

precipitated a visible revolution in his nation’s literature, but Par-

emerged out of a revolutionary fervor. In the words of Capel Lofft, “At the time when this poem was in composing, all the Powers of the human Mind were acting vigor-

adise Lost itself

ously in every direction”:

and Microscopes had been just invented; and the instru-

Telescopes

ments for measuring the density and temperature of the Air. BOYLE and were forming themselves; LOCKE was

NEWTON

.

exercising his Understanding. a diverse

view, an >ERA.

of this unrivalled Poem,

mane and

TURE

judicious

It

to

The

year [1667]

gave to our

it.

.

STATUTES, .

.

constitutes, in

LITERATURE

the glory

our Code of LAW, one of its most hu.

.

MANUFACof Dressing WOOL, and

and to our

.

the last great step in the progress

the art of Dying

itself,

These auspicious

instants to the Progress

of

Improvement, in the most different Branches; this confluence of Arts and Inventions to the same Point of Time, which have nothing, apparently, in common with each other, but that Energy and Spirit which throws back confining Enclosures, opens and enlightens a vast Area in the boundless space of human Perfectibility. .

What

the starry series are to the eye of

those regions of the Universe he has

HERSCHEL,

made

in

.

.

exploring

accessible, these clus-

—

”

Feminist Milton

[70]

Moral Light are to the Observer of the Moral the expanse of Time, as this Nebula advances to its matu-

tering Radiations of

World.

In

they increase; they separately condense; their several aggre-

rity,

gates are mutually approximated. Formerly,

and

that partial,

was

and with long intervals of Darkness

of Genius scattered through

from Nation

it

a

City or

a

Republic:

to Nation; and, perhaps, ere

many

a

Conflux,

— of the Rays

now

it

spreads

ages shall have es-

Mankind to the Light and Intelligence of other Systems unnumbered and unimagined: when PLATO, CICERO,

caped,

it

shall unite

BACON, NEWTON, MILTON, LOCKE, ROUSSEAU,

and

other Sublime Enlighteners and Benefactors of their Species, shall

impart Illumination, and augment their own, by Intellectual Intercourse with the Inhabitants of Worlds, whose Beams, since the

Creation of

System.

this,

have not yet arrived within the Limits of our

56

The prophetic Milton was now

effecting an apocalypse of mind.

Milton’s prose works were being widely circulated and just as

widely read, with selections from them stressing Milton’s intensely nationalistic spirit, his disregard for

custom and

own tradi-

tion and association of both with error, and with the selections

themselves being advanced for their educative function, their en-

gendering

a

search for the highest

wisdom of all

the ages

—

in the

words of Basil Montagu, “teaching] affliction how to direct its sorrow and to turn its grief into virtues and advantages.” 57 Separate editions

of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio,

Power, and The Readie and Easie

coming once again and

failures

a lens

Way ushered

through which

of revolution

as well as the

to

A

Treatise of Civil

in the 1790s,

58

be-

glimpse the successes

hopes and dreams that

was Milton’s male readership that, for the most part, regretted seeing poets meddling in politics and that reviled those who did so for scandalizing the muses by having them court the demons of politics. On the other hand, Milton’s female readers, whatever their ideological leanings, seem always to have discerned a political aspect in his poems and to have cele-

survived

its

wreckage.

It

56

Capel Lofft, The First and Second Books of “Paradise Lost mond’s, 1793), pp. xxvii-xxviii.

Montagu, “Introduction,” Selections from Milton .... 2nd cd. (2 vols.; London, 1807), I, v. Basil

58

See Monthly Review,

3

(1790), 104-5,

the

and 7 (1792),

(Bury

St.

Ed-

Works of Taylor, Hooker, 102.

Milton’s Early Female Readership

brated

them

terparts,

instead,

for

it.

This readership would not,

like its

disengage Milton’s prose writings from it

engaged them

(71)

male counhis

poetry;

another transcript of Milton’s

as yet

mind, “the scattered leaves of the

sybil,

”w

availing itself of the

prose works as an entry code to the poetry.

To

segregate the

prose from the poetry, to read Milton piecemeal, was to mistake the part for the

whole and

to ensure full-scale

misunder-

standings.

Yet Milton’s poems continued to be regarded as “his best Image,” for in their contemplation and especially in the contemplation of Paradise Lost could be pursued, said Lofft, “the Prog-

—

—

ress

of renovated and exalted Existence through the Ages of

minds susceptible of these Hopes and Aspiration, MILTON wrote.” 60 And the minds most susceptible to these aspirations, most fired by these hopes, were those of the young boys and girls, not just men and women, and especially girls, were now being put to school with Milton in the understanding, so finely formulated by Jane West, that “a man of true taste will not think a woman completely charming unless, when in a seriEternity. For

—

ous mood, he could describe her

heaven

in her eye,

/

and benevolence sparkle

and gesture, yet never shed It

having ‘Grace

in all her steps,

In every gesture dignity and love;’ and shall

grace, piety, dignity,

hearts ?”

as

in the eye, step,

their divine influence

over the

lips

and

61

takes an educated, informed, agile intelligence to “trace the

dawning genius of a Milton, or

the clear intellect of a

Newton”

sometimes unacceptable transgressions of Scripture and even his transgressions of the tradition of epic where, in contradistinction to Homer and Virgil, Milton “speeds / To realms unknown to pagan lays. / He sings no mor62 For his female readership, and in the popular culture tal war.” generally, Milton is preeminently a visionary poet and, if the

and

to detect Milton’s regular yet

See “Milton’s Prose Writings,” The New Monthly Magazine, 1 (1834), 42. See also “The Poetry of Milton’s Prose-Writing,” The Mirror 36 (1840), 228-29, 59

275-76,

as well as

The Poetry of Milton’s Prose (London,

1827).

“Lofft, The First and Second Books of “Paradise Lost," p. xxxi. M West, Letters to a Young Lady, p. 349. 62

Ibid., pp. 220, 313.

Plays (2 vols.;

London,

See also Jane West’s 1799),

II,

247.

“An Ode on

Poetry,” in Poems and

Feminist Milton

[72]

imaginary dialogue between Court and Country (1780) is any indication, stands as the poet of the country and ordinary folk, in

who

contrast to Shakespeare,

is

here represented as the poet of

the court and of elitist society, neither of which apparently

how

knows

Thus Court will ask, “What was the meaning of his high and mighty battle fought, and not one creature slain?” only to be instructed by Country that here “Milton was desirous to make his genius shine, but meant it all in parables, similes and hieroglyphics; the war was intellectual, as now it is on earth.” This proposition concerning the importance of reading Milton metaphorically, extended to the whole of Paradise to read Milton.

.

Lost,

.

.

nevertheless illustrated through an elaborate and carefully

is

elaborated interpretation of [located in] the

Book

mind of man.” 63

war is If war and repression were twin where

VI,

“this great

manifestations of Puritanism, this supposedly Puritan poet brings

both under scrutiny and of both renders

The Milton of tional legends

.

.

muses and

Their Milton

“above .

.

.

.

female readership

with ancient mythology

the tales of the ets.

this

is at

praise, as

.

in

a

a

poet

such

a

who

way

is

mixes na-

as to dignify

mythologist and moral

Paradise Lost

.

is

harsh critique.

to authenticate the stories

once .

a

of the poallegorist,

above any thing which

[they are] able to read, except the sacred writers.” 64 Milton’s

poetry, in turn,

is

an “immortal ornament of our language,”

ing and improving the imaginative faculty of

imposing

itself

on them

that “elevates the heart

.

as .

.

women

poetry for memorization ;

—

fir-

and thus as

poetry

adds energy and grace to precepts of

morality; kindles benevolence by pathetic narrative and reflection.

.

.

.

Such are

in general,” says this

anonymous

author, “the

works of Milton.” 65 Milton is but one of five poets to whom Catherine Macaulay Graham would consign the literary education of teenage females, for reasons perhaps best explained by Catherine Rebecca Huntingtower in her praise of Milton’s Edenic 63

See the

anonymous Court and

Country:

A

Paraphrase upon Milton (London,

1780), pp. 4, 11.

M The Works of Mrs. Chapone (2 vols.; Dublin, 1786), I, 121. But see also Ewert, Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter p. 40 (the letter is dated 3 October 1762), and Almira Phelps, The Female Student; or, Lectures to Young Ladies on Female Education (New York, 1836), pp. 204, 205. bS The Works of Mrs. Chapone, I, 121, and the anonymous The Female Aegis; or, The Duties of Women from Childhood to Old Age (London, 1798), pp. 78, 79. ,

Milton’s Early Female Readership vision

Adam

where

and Eve rove

“blissful

[73]

groves” and where

shewn / Unexampled, and alone. What had already become a woman’s text was now being used

“awful grandeur

still is

by women writers as a text through which they could discover and define themselves as artists. In this respect, however, Milton’s epic-prophecies proved to be frustrating texts by virtue of the literary tradition they would foster. Especially with epic and prophecy, there seemed to be a genderfication of genre. Thus Hannah More writes, “The lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more daring flights of the Tragic Muse, seem reserved for the bold adventurers of the other sex.” 67 But more problematic still was prophecy. Milton placed himself in a line of prophets stretching from Moses to John of Patmos and was, for all the Romantics, the chief modern purveyor of that tradition. Yet prophecy was also part and parcel of an exclusionary tradition, militantly masculine and powerfully patriarchal. Still, it is a tradition that Milton would seem to open to women in the wish of Areopagitica that the time

arrive

when

“all

the Lords people are

become

55-56) and that he did explicitly open to women in epics through Eve’s prophetic utterance at the end of Paradise

prophets” his

would

(II,

embracing “prophetic Anna” in the roll call of prophets in Paradise Regained ( 1 2 5 5). Yet for women writers there was also a curse that accompanied this blessing, for in their fettered state they would become, as Anna Barbauld opined, Lost and

by

his

.

“prophetessfes] of woe,” seldom listened

to, largely

because they

were of the “wrong” sex. No wonder that, even though they saw the EBenic books of Paradise Lost as embodying their ideal of •“conversation,” women’s eyes were fixed to the books of lamento the shedding of tears tation with which this poem concludes and the promise that those tears eventually will be wiped away, 68

—

^See Catherine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education (London, 1790), p. 130; and Catherine Rebecca Huntingtower, Review of Poetry, Ancient and Modern (London, 1799), p. 19; but see also The Monthly Review, 30 (1799), 393. 67 Hannah More, Essays on Various Subjects, Principally Designed for Young Ladies (London, 1777), p. 7. ^See The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld: With a Memoir (2 vols.; London, 1825), I, 1 — li; II, 17. But see also Jane Adams, “A Triumph Sung by Eve,” Miscellany Poems, p. 157; “The Lady and the Pye,” in The Works of Hannah More, II, 8; and William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (4 vols.; London, 1834), III, 7.

Feminist Milton

[74]

books in which a defeated Eve becomes triumphant as she assumes the role of the restorer of Paradise. From the very beginning, women seem to have understood that the Edenic books of Paradise Lost held the poem’s political content, that in them the poem’s sexual politics were to be sought and could be found only by resisting the easy temptation, as Fredric Jameson describes it, and

to the

“to

show

that class attitudes condition Milton’s sexual politics,”

and more, “that patriarchal attitudes end up programming [Mil69 It is just such attiton’s] public positions in the political field .” tudes and values

—

this official

ideology

—

that, inscribed

boundaries, Paradise Lost exposes, deliberately, in

its

within

poetry of

a

planned subversion.

Women were no less sensitive to the politics of Milton’s poetry than they had been to the poetry of Milton’s prose.

They were

ea-

ger to promote the idea that in his union of polemics and poetry

Milton becomes

his

own

best

commentator,

his politics revealing

theology and both together functioning

his

on the poetry. To take such to

it

in

women, was

a position,

as

marginal glosses

however, much

argument, entailed something of

a

less

hold

professional risk for

especially those aspiring to the rank of poet. Writing

itself a

subversive act for

women, who confronted

far greater

who, as poets, genres. But Milton

obstacles writing poetry than writing fiction and

found themselves restricted to the seems to have given women access

lesser

to the high genres

and to

a

revolutionary tradition, thus supplying them with an arsenal of

subversive strategies that were crucial to their enterprise. All

women

had to do, according to John Hamilton Reynolds in The Examiner, was venture a political opinion and their professional credentials

would be

unpopular opinion

called into question, but let a

man

issue an

and the opinion attacked — quite apart from the poetry Mrs. Barbauld publish but in verse,

political

“let

a political

is

.

.

.

opinion in verse, differing with the Rulers that are and

the opinions that ought to be, and she should be brought forward

with

all

his poetical sense

on her head.” 7 " Not just Anna Bar-

69

Fredric Jameson, “Religion and Ideology,” in 1642: Literature and Power the Seventeenth Century ed. Francis Barker et al. (Essex: Univ. ofEssex, 1981), ,

335 7,,

in

p.

-

SeeJohn Hamilton Reynolds in The Examiner, 728 (6 January 1822), 5, and The Examiner, 741 (7 April 1822), 212, as well as the impressive editorial intro-

”

Milton’s Early Female Readership

bauld, but

Lady Morgan and Anna Plumptre

as well,

jected to this sort of abusive review, and there

is

[75]

were sub-

the related ex-

ample afforded by Sarah Siddons, whose abridgment of Paradise Lost was used to throw her entire theatrical career under a cloud. Her “foolish opinions, and erring ones” were said to make of Paradise Lost “a ruin” by first cutting off Milton’s head and then .

.

hacking

at his limbs.

71

book by Siddons under review was

In 1822 the

separate

titles:

Story of

Our

For the Use

.

first

An

First Parents, Selected from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”:

Young

of

Persons.

Siddons explains that the 190-page earlier for reading

riod of four evenings to her children,

minds

two

Abridgment of “Paradise Lost," then The

abridgment, prepared several years “their

issued with

.

.

.

was

a

pe-

also intended to inspire

with an early admiration of Milton” by pres-

enting, “in uninterrupted connection, those parts

the fate of our

over

first

which

relate to

parents,” even if such a version of Milton’s

story can be accomplished only by excising

all

of Books

V

and VI

from Books XI and XII, that does not “immediately bear upon their affecting and important story.” 72 Prepared by a woman who, while lady’s maid to Miss Greathead, reportedly “recitefd] Milton in the servants’ 73 hall, and sometimes before aristocratic company,” this volume provides a valuable perpsective on how Milton was being read, by whom, and with what inflections. And Siddons’ book is clearly the inspiration behind another by Eliza Bradburn published eight years later, which shifts the interest from what to read of Paradise Lost to how this poem ought to be read. and whatever

A

else

significant

from the poem,

work of the

especially

nineteenth century, Eliza Bradburn’s

documents the politics of reading and of emerged from the eighteenth-century feminist

Story of “Paradise Lost

interpretation that

duction by Sandra

Women

M.

Gilbert and Susan

Gubar

to Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist

(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979). 'The London Magazine, 7 (1823), 216. 72 See An Abridgement of “Paradise Lost’’ (London, 1822), pp. iii-iv. Cf. “Under her mother’s guidance and direction Clara had acquired an early acquaintance Milton,’’ and see the anonymous Conversations on Poetry; Intended for the with Amusement and Instruction of Children (London, 1824), p. 33. Milton is here repreEssays on

Poets

7

.

.

.

sented as the premiere pastoral poet and as

a

poet unequalcd within the province

of epic. 73

See Dictionary of National Biography, 52 (1897), 195.

Feminist Milton

[76]

way

consciousness of Milton, and in a sition that

“whatever Milton

is

that defies the later

propo-

male imagination Milton

to the

—

—

are the Patriarch of patriarchs and the inhibiting Father one.” 74 First, for Bradburn, Milton’s sourcebook is Scripture,

which he adds a great deal from his own imagination; not, however, with the intention of deceiving his readers.” Second, “to

Milton’s

poem

“is a fiction ... a poetical

embellishment” that of-

ten veers from, even violates, the facts of scriptural history and that itself becomes

more

accessible once

its

scrambled narrative

is

unscrambled so that reading and interpretation can commence with Milton’s account of the

celestial battle.

Book

VI, that

holds the keys for a metaphorical reading of Paradise Lost, full

of parables,

similes,

a

is,

poem

and hieroglyphics. Third, interpretation

must grapple with theological cruxes introduced into the was not the poem by Milton, who implies that “Jesus Christ great and eternal God, as St. Paul says he was”; who propagates the fiction that “the good and mighty spirits who fight at the command of God should be unable in two days to overcome his enemies”; and who, finally, would make us “love our saviour itself

.

much more

than

God

the Father.”

.

.

75

Paradise Lost retains traces of a political radicalism that here in-

vades Milton’s theology.

poem

suggests

how

A

mistaken

survey of women’s reaction to the it is

to argue, as

Mary Poovey does

with reference to Mary Wollstonecraft, that Milton authority so rigidly conventional that

women

is a

were driven

cultural to chal-

lenge him, though usually obliquely, by coding their outrage in

women

allusions or italicized words, that

even sometimes cal

extreme.”

76

fearful, “to take

.

.

[their]

Milton by fronting

reluctant,”

aggression to

its

logi-

his

supposed orthodox-

but are instead, in the case of Wollstonecraft certainly and also

of Siddons and Bradburn, evidence of 74

“still

Their hesitations and reticences do not stem from

a reluctance to affront ies

.

were

The quotation

is

their

own

perception of

a

from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman

The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 192. 'Bradburn, The Story of “ Paradise Lost,’’ pp. 5, 7-8, 9, 33. 76 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecra ft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 73. in

the Attic:

)

Milton’s Early Female Readership

with ideological contradictions, that could

text, rife

own

[

now

77

be en-

Women

were not quaking and trembling in the face of Milton’s authority, but rather engaging Milton as an authority and making of him their sponsor. They had in their classrooms the same text the men did, but found in it a strikingly different poem because of their decidedly different surmises, at least initially, about how to read it and with what em-

listed in their

cause.

phases.

Siddons’ poetical abridgment finds

Bradburn’s paraphrase of Paradise Lost

counterpart, then, in

its

in prose, but

ing self-parody provided by the children

who,

with mock-

listening to their

mother’s prose paraphrase, keep pleading for the poetry. Sevenyear-old William registers astonishment that Dr. Johnson did not find Paradise Lost an “entertaining” book, and his older sister,

promises that when, “at fourteen years of age,

Eliza,

becomes

fore,” she

plain hand,

them

to

my

cially

God still

Sunday school

is a

this patter sits the

poem, not

not be-

teacher, she will “write, in a

favorite passages, that the older girls

memory.” Behind

Paradise Lost

poem

a

if

may commit

proposition that

a theological treatise,

and that

as a

emphatically about the relationship of the sexes, espe-

it is

about the place of women only, shee for

God

in

him”

Even

“Hee for omitted, young Eliza

in creation.

lines are

if the

asks her mother, “Is nothing said of Eve’s talking with the

do not like her going away, just as if she did not have sense enough to understand such conversation.” Thereupon “Mamma” responds: “Milton tells us that EVe, as well as her husband, was attentive to the story. Our poet does her the justice to say, she went not because she was incapable of being delighted with the discourse, but she chose to hear the remainder of Raphael’s communication from Adam’s lips.” And this dialogue between mother and daughter is but a prelude to the story of Eve’s creation and to the subject of Eve’s angel?” and subsequently observes,

“I

.

equality with

Emily.

—

[It]

Adam: seems

ning, for the William. to

—

In

Adam;

as if it

woman

two or

to

were not the design of God,

I

begin-

obey her husband.

three parts of the story,

therefore,

in the

think

it

was proper

Eve appears

for her to

inferior

obey him.

.

.

Feminist Milton

[78]

Eliza.

— Whatever Milton may say about I

Emily. tary

believe he

was

— Mamma, on the

ing the

Mamma.

Bible:

man

—

I

I

I

do not think we read

command

of man’s having any right to

in the Bible

do

it,

often see you reading Dr. Clarke’s Is

before

any thing said

God

will read a

in

.

Nor

.

passed sentence upon them?

few

lines to

you, which

would

marked

I

interest you:

to the will

From Bradburn’s vantage

eve-

last

—

Adam and Eve were formed woman had as much right to

man; being subject of her curse.” 77

Commen-

about the woman’s obey-

it

“In the creation,

and the

.

better.

ning; expecting this subject

parts,

her.

of her husband

with equal rule as the is

one part

point, Milton’s views parallel her

own God

on the equality of the sexes, and if she excises the “Flee for only” verses from her representation of Milton’s poem, she does

so in the belief that such excisions, instead of papering over

cruxes in Paradise Lost, bring us closer to

its

ideological

commit-

ments.

Within

context

this

Frankenstein authored

we

Mary Shelley’s of Milton when she was

should also remember

by an avid reader

just eighteen years old and presented as a sort of

duct book. 7 *

We

should remember too that

Romantic con-

this

work

is

cur-

one of the Romantic period’s major rereadings of Paradise Lost, as that period’s “most profound imaginative recreation” of Milton’s poem.™ It is an open question (particularly in view of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s devaluing of Milton’s sublimity and valuing of his nonpatriarchal representation rently regarded as

of Eve

after the Fall)

whether Mary Shelley should be aligned

with the paradigm of female response charted here, instead of with one outlined by Gilbert and Gubar ginia

77

Woolf whose Milton

See Bradburn,

“deals in

.

.

in .

connection with

a

Vir-

sublimity but never in

Story of “Paradise Lost,” pp. 53, 58, 72-73, 102, 143. '“Gilbert and Gubar, I he Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 222, 237, so imply. 7; See Stuart Curran, “The Siege of Hateful Contraries: Shelley, Mary Shelley, '['he

Byron, and Paradise Lost," in Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), P- 218; see also Harold Bloom, The Ringers

in the

Lower: Studies

Press, 1971), p. 120.

in

Romantic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Milton’s Early Female Readership

vows

’

human

the passions of the

heart.

80

After

[79]

Mary never

all,

disa-

the sentiments of her mother, or those of her husband ex-

pressed in his preface to her novel: that

human

a

poem

like Paradise Lost

commandingly and that its exquisite combination of human feelings makes it one of “the highest specimens of poetry.”* What we know of the delineates

passions comprehensively and

1

collaborative

between Mary and her husband,

effort

Bysshe Shelley

—

that the Miltonic element in Frankenstein can be

attributed in part to Shelley himself

feminist criticism moderate spairingly

lowing

Percy

acquiescent

that, if this

is

— requires

is

it

minimum

that a

description of this novel as “a de-

its

‘misreading’ so,

at

of Paradise Lost”* 2 by

al-

so perhaps because of her poet-

husband’s intrusions upon the novel.

To acknowledge

Frankenstein, in a certain stage of its

tion, as a joint effort

composi-

need not credit the view that “nothing but an

absolute magnetism of her brain by Shelley’s can account for her

having risen so

far

Mary undoubtedly

above her usual

self as in ‘Frankenstein.’

.

.

.

more than she gave.” 83 But such an

received

acknowledgment does admit

what it was that she received and has the potential to complicate enormously what might be construed and said about attitudes toward Milton projected by the novel. While Mary is writing Frankenstein, her husband is reading Milton and at this time suggests that she expand her book. Mary’s journal entries are revelatory: 21

August 1816:

the question of

Shelley and

talked about

I

my

story.

.

.

.

Shelley

reads Milton. .

22 August 1816:

In 1816

both

[I]

Write.

Mary and

.

.

.

Shelley reads Milton-.

Shelley read Milton, or

Shelley reads Milton and, as she can, 15

16

November 1816: November 1816:

Mary

more

exactly,

listens:

Shelley begins “Paradise Lost” In the

evening Shelley reads 2nd book of

“Paradise Lost” ^Gilbert and Gubar, The 8,

Mary

Madwoman

Shelley, Frankenstein;

or,

in the Attic, p.

The Modern Prometheus,

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982),

Madwoman

82

Gilbert and Gubar, The

83

Dictionary of National Biography

,

190.

p. 7; see also p. 6.

in the Attic, p.

52 (1897), 29.

220.

ed.

James Rieger

Feminist Milton

[8o]

November

17

... he

1816:

reads “Paradise Lost” aloud in the

evening

November 19 November 20 November 18

1816:

Shelley reads “Paradise Lost” aloud

1816:

Shelley reads

1816:

...

Lost” aloud to 21

22

November November

.

.

.

“Paradise Lost” aloud

evening [Shelley reads] “Paradise

in the

me

1816:

After tea Shelley read “Paradise Lost” aloud

1816:

Shelley

.

.

.

finishes “Paradise Lost”

between 18 March and 2 April 1817, when Mary completing and correcting Frankenstein (“writing every day”), In the period

is

she

Mary rate

also reading Milton’s

is

writes, Shelley reads,

—

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates

Mary and

Shelley talk.

about Milton, whose Paradise Lost

at least

tant subtext in

women’s

history” 85 because

literature.

Through

contains her story

it

is

this

— women

They

84 .

collabo-

now an imporpoem “a true

—

are learning to

express, not efface, themselves and to realize, not repress, their

female desire. Eve soothes their sorrows, shares their thoughts,

and emblematizes the horrors of

zons their hopes, bringing dignity to their despair.

mands

A poem turned,

Mary

se,

but the implications of his ideas for

men would often use against women by women, to their own advantage. that

Shelley

ends with

makes

this

who

is

fashion a daughter

we

are told,

M See Mary

draws

is

women. is

being

“admirable education”

often singled out as is

Mary’s having Lodore, accustomed in turn

not

,

author’s ideal of womanhood. There

who

is

point in her late novel Lodore which

a tribute to the title character’s

of his daughter Ethel,

wife,

What com-

the attention of Milton’s early female readership

Milton’s ideas per

in

embla-

their lives, but she also

embodying

obviously ironic play here to being

managed by

managed by her mother, now wishing

who

is at

the

his

to

once docile and dependent. Lodore,

“his chief ideas

from Milton’s Eve,” thereby

Jones (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1944), pp. 60-61, 68-69, 78. Before she ever undertook to write Frankenstein, Mary Shelley had read Comus, Lycidas, Of Education, and (with her husband) both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (see ibid., pp. 21, 29, 36, Shelley’s Journal, ed. Frederick L.

47-48). See also William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (Boston: Twayne, 1972), pp. 32, 48. 85

S ee Frankenstein, ed. Rieger,

p. 125.

8

Milton’s Early Female Readership satisfying himself that his daughter will be “the all

that

is

embodied

adorable and estimable in her sex.” 86

Lodore. Cherishing an ideal of what

women

1

ideal

The joke

might

is

]

1

of

on

be, but hold-

ing no lofty opinion of what they are, initially wanting his

daughter to become what he sive),

is

Lodore eventually wishes

(passionate, dependent, submis-

ate her, teach her dignity, in every

which,

Mary

qualities a

learned

cates

women

wise

way

to extend her reach

—

Shelley implies, are precisely the capacities and

woman

Mary

mind, accultur-

to enlarge Ethel’s

is

going to learn from reading Paradise

from her mother

that the

book men

Lost.

believe edu-

submission actually educates them other-

into

— into truth and gentleness, dignity and wisdom. Male mis-

conceptions of Paradise Lost allow banner.

The human

long before her,

be in

is

women

to

triumph under

condition, Ethel discovers, as

move from paradise to There we find our paradise

not to

exile, in prison.

its

Eve had done

paradise but to

— or not

at all.

Wordsworth himself had been troubled by Milton’s treatment of his daughters, which “seemed to betoken a low estimate of the conditon and purposes of the female mind” and, citing the verse “Hee for God only, shee for God in him” (PL IV. 299), he remarked, “That ...La low, a very low and very false estimate of woman’s condition.” But then Wordsworth thinks, somewhat as Byron does, that Milton’s Eve is an idealized version of womanhood, created only

in the poet’s imagination, not

from

his experi-

ence with former spouses, and, as does Coleridge, that the Edenic

books of Paradise Lost portray women “in their incorruptible na7 ture.”* Male misconceptions of Paradise Lost have now given way to the views of Milton’s female readership; indeed, women’s views influenced and perhaps even determined interpretation of Books XI and XII during the Romantic period. Feminist concern with these books seems to have sponsored the first significant male appreciation of them. Adam has usually been regarded as the principal character in Milton’s poem, but Robert Southey assures Walter Savage Landor, in an imaginary conversation authored by the latter, that Eve ^Mary

Shelley, Lodore

87

(3 vols.;

London,

1835),

I,

38;

III,

305.

See The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970), pp. 148, 184; see also p. 518.

Feminist Milton

[82]

is

“more

far

interesting.”

88

It is

Milton’s editors, translators, and

misguided interpreters, not Milton, ing” for Eve,

who

like

Adam

is

who would

induce

a “loath-

a “rational” creature, says

Cole-

of them being “the completion of the other.” For Coleridge, moreover, it is in the Edenic books, especially in their ridge, each

predominant over the which if “there is little ac-

representation of Eve, that “the poet

theologian.” 89 These are the books in tion

.

.

there

.

is

much

is

more enjoyment.” 7" Percy

repose, and

Bysshe Shelley seems to have concurred. He wonders whether, because of his “avowal of certain speculative notions, Milton was a Christian or not, at the period of the composition of Paradise Lost," for he also believes that to give “systematic form” to .

Christian mythology, as Milton does,

may

.

.

be to expose and ex-

plode that mythology. Shelley makes clear that he refers here to

mechanism of the

“the whole

affair

,

—

the temptation

damnation of the innocent posterity of our

first

ton’s early female readership helps to forge an

standing of the poet and affords alternative

which

to read his poetry, giving to criticism

of Eve

parents.”

,

— the

71

Mil-

improved underperspectives from

new

inflections

and

another focus. Interpretation, once centered in the Edenic books

Romantic period begins to swing on its axis from Books IV through IX to Books XI and XII, where this poem’s ideological commitments are driven into the open. In their readings of the middle books of Paradise Lost, which often of Paradise

glance

Lost, in the

at these last

to which,

women:

books,

a

female readership hints

uprooting the old, Milton charts

they are exalted as

a sex,

and

role in history.

“‘Ibid., p. 309. 89

Ibid., p. 199, 245.

‘“‘See 91

comment in ibid., 535, 543 (my italics).

Hazlitt’s

Ibid., pp.

p. 386.

at

the extent

new paradigms

their sex

is

for

given an exalted

Chapter 4

An

Alternative Perspective

on Milton and Milton

more

If

somehow

fully than

women

brings

life

to this

Women

man and woman, Eve

Adam.

— Helen Darbishire

are to be liberated they

of culture that bind them

must dismantle those

aspects

in chains.

— K. K. Ruthven

The mediation of Milton’s poetry within

the popular culture

through conduct books and schoolbooks, together with the evangelizing of Milton and the feminizing of his epic prophecy, paves

way

the

for an

dise Lost.

improved,

albeit belated,

Rather than forging for the

understanding of Para-

poem new

horizons of ex-

pectation, Milton’s early female readership simply restored Paradise Lost to the

horizons that existed within Milton’s

own

lifetime

and that were determined partly by the positions Milton publicized in his prose tracts and partly by generic choices for his

poems, which were

— or

could be construed

as

— ideological

signals.

Wolfgang

Iser’s

hypothesis that “deviation from the norms

deviation into sense”

was

a tenet for

was the proposition from two different systems which

articulated,

as

reading long before that “a literary text

exist outside

is

a

was draws

it

of the text

it-

self”:

.

.

.

the system of

system of previous lected

its

historical situation

literatures

and encapsulated

and

literary

norms and norms. The elements

and

social

in the text are called the repertoire.

the se-

These [83]

Feminist Milton

[84]

elements self

.

.

are selected

.

and rearranged within the

according to the particular intention of that

literary text it-

text.

[They pro-

background through which the new system presented in the literary work can be approached and against which it can be vide] ... a

measured.

This

is

1

the sort of critical activity to

which we

sum-

are being

moned by a Mary Wray, a Lucy Hutton, an Eliza Bradburn, a Mary Wollstonecraft, or a Mary Shelley, all of whom understand the conventions of oblique discourse and the consequent need for

attending not just to what

is

said, often

through slippery allusion

—

for and intertextual complexity, but also to what is left unsaid reading silences and margins, for reading between the lines. They

to understand as well that biblical poetry, of which Paradise

seem Lost

is

the world’s premiere example,

from exegesis

as

it is

a

is

as

much

a derivation

deviation from the scriptural text

itself,

and that methodological advances, however important to the history of criticism, may finally be of less consequence than ideolog-

— indeed Milton’s female readership knew from the beginning — what the imaginary con-

ical

They

breakthroughs.

all

know

versation between Eliza Bradburn and her children that the platitudes

and

pieties

of

a

makes

clear:

Christian misogynistic tra-

dition are present in Paradise Lost but that they are there to be silenced.

By

the middle of the eighteenth century, even

among

Milton’s

were being drawn between women whose prototype is Satan and women whose prototype is Eve and between the sexes, where differences are evidence of distinction, not inequality, and where ideally their different qualities blend as they do, for example, in “the calm heroism of our divine Deliverer .” 2 Milton not only “knew the sexes well” but “painted from the completest standards he could find.” His portrait of Eve “may be considered as the model of a woman most amiably feminine,” argues James Fordyce, who implies too that Milton himmale readers,

fine distinctions

—

1

Wolfgang

terpretation

I,

“Narrative Strategies as

of Narrative, ed. Mario

ronto: Univ. 2

Iser,

ofToronto

143;

222; the

first

Means of Communication,”

Valdes and

OwenJ.

in In-

Miller (1978; rpt.

To-

Press, 1981), pp. 100, 104.

See James Fordyce, Sermons II,

J.

a

Young Women, 6th ed. edition appeared in 1766. to

(2 vols.;

London,

1769),

An self

Alternative Perspective

“who

should be numbered with those authors

tell

[85]

[women]

most convincingly what they are, and what they ought to be.”' Harbored within Milton’s realistic portrait, the defects of which are finally those of human nature, is an idealism allowing |

[

[

|

and honoring sexual difference, potentiality for self-improvement, and certain attributes of character worthy of general admi-

for

and emulation. Such estimates of Milton’s opinion of women stem largely from valuations by women themselves and ration

by attending to the carefully controlled contexts of individual utterances; by sorting through, not sliding by, the contradictory evidence afforded by Milton’s writings; by making imaginative construals on the assumption that Milton’s poetry, instead of inculcating, interacts with orthodoxies and interleaves its politics and theology, its social and ethical issues, in such a way that each is an examination of the other. Paradise Lost especially was seen as a field of opposing stresses and signals. When the Son comes into the Garden to judge Adam and Eve (and this is a wild card in Milton’s poem!), he utters the commonplaces that, previously uttered by Adam, are contested both by God and Raphael: “God set thee above her made of ' v ^thee, / And for thee, whose perfection farr excell’d / Hers in all real dignitie” (X. 149-51). Yet even here, as Barbara Lewalski alare arrived at

..

lows, the Son, as Michael will later do, “gives short shrift to

Adam’s misogynist blame-shifting” 4 “Was shee thy God, Superior, or but equal?" the Son asks Adam, and then reminds him that Eve was made “to attract/Thy Love, not thy Subjection” :

.

(X. 14*5-47, 152-53;

my italics).

.

.

.

In speech after speech the cliches

of Christianity are embedded so that they

may

be challenged.

Particularly in

its

representation of the relation between the sexes,

Paradise Lost

is

riddled with contradictions carefully planted

within the text of the tistic

poem

that are evidence

strategy, not of defective artistry.

inward assessments of such

all,

3 4

/

Adam

And

Ibid.,

I,

and Eve

in their

worthie seemd, for

97;

II,

ar-

Outward impressions and

relations are alike represented

different characters variously defined.

Garden,

of sophisticated

When

first

and by

glimpsed

in the

“naked Majestie seemd Lords of

in thir looks

Divine

/

The image of

160.

Barbara Lewalski, “Paradise Lost ” and

Princeton Univ. Press, 1985),

p. 261.

the Rhetoric

of Literary Forms (Princeton:

Feminist Milton

[86]

thir glorious

Maker shone”

my italics).

(IV. 290-92;

But they

also

seem “not equal, as thir sex not equal seemd

For contemplation hee and valour formd, For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,

Hee

for

God

only, shee for

God

in

297-99;

(IV. 296,

him.

my

italics)

Seeing here as Satan sees, installing himself within the Satanic perspective, the narrator describes Eve’s “dissheveld” tresses and

“wanton

them evidence of Eve’s “subjecinduce in others, on the basis of such evi-

ringlets” only to find in

tion” (IV. 305 -8) and to

dence, an impression of Eve’s fallenness

— an

impression that

Milton’s strange and slippery text eventually will check, cancel. bait,

Viewed another way,

not

is

clearly

not

passage from Paradise Lost

ballast, for a deconstructionist reading, bait

with astonishing ease by J. Miller

this

if

is

swallowed

Hillis Miller.

aware of the Chinese box

that contains the

aforementioned passage. Embedded within an extended description of Satan’s

first

view of Eden

is

a report

Garden, and embedded within that vision tion of

Adam

is

of

of the

his vision

Satan’s

initial

percep-

and Eve. In Miller’s words, “Milton’s language,

here as so often, goes against the apparent intention of his argu-

ment, so that this

is

it

impossible to say decisively that

or that.” 5 Yet Miller

tionist reading,

which

is

also

aware

that his

says only

it

own

deconstruc-

privileges multiple meanings, each under-

mining the others, militates against an ultimate meaning; he is acutely aware that implicit in deconstruction is a sexual politics that Miller himself leaves unarticulated but that, perhaps tingly, his

though

own

exercise in deconstruction exposes.

need not always

it

be, a politics

It

unwitis

here,

founded not upon sexual

upon the diminishing of the female sex. example of reading deconstructively admits

difference but Miller’s

one possible way contending meanings may

interfere

to only

with one

another while not canceling each other out and, more, exhibits J.

New

York

l

“How

Deconstruction Works: Paradise Lost, IV, 304-8,” imes Magazine, 9 February 1986, p. 25. Miller,

Hillis

a

An

Alternative Perspective

[87]

curious throwback to an older criticism that, discriminating be-

tween unconscious meaning and conscious intent, pits Milton the poet against Milton the theologian. Miller thus identifies Milton’s “apparent intention” that of portraying an Eve who, in accordance with Christian tradition, “is made for subjection” and who, by virtue of her subjection, is unfallen. Rising up against this orthodoxy is Milton’s portrait of a disheveled, wanton Eve, a figuration that is at odds with and challenging the orthodox depiction of woman subjected. Miller concludes, therefore, that “Eve’s disheveled wantonness means that she has in effect already fallen whatever Milton may say about those tendril locks implying subjection”: “This makes it impossible to include her in the general scheme of creation in fact, it puts her above Adam or outside his control and identifies her with Milton’s independent power of poetry. Eve’s curly tendrils imply independence as

—

.

.

.

,

—

well as subjection .” 6

Milton’s female readership, always quick to distinguish be-

on ad-

tween Milton’s views and those of

his characters, early

dressed the very issues Miller

while also dismissing the in-

raises,

terpretation he proffers as demonically perverse and nihilistic.

Montagu writing

Witness, for example, Elizabeth

to

Leonard

Smelt:

Voltaire views Shakespear at the

summit of Parnassus with

the

same malice with which Satan beheld Adam [and Eve] in the midst r of Paradise; I dare say Mons Satan was very witty on our general Parents’ unsophisticated state and unadorned condition, but oh .

Messieurs Satan and Voltaire! simplicity, nakedness

is

not

know

that in a state

a sign

of impudence, nor either the

of innocence and

Child or the Parent of wantonness.

It is

our

own

fallen perspective,

versely, that for

sary ,”

7

Montagu

“renders the guard of caution neces-

7

on Milton’s narrative the half-told tale) and on the final

and given the attention she

strategy (on his preference for

6

prone to reading Milton so perfixes

Ibid.

Elizabeth Montagu, Bluestocking Letters, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (London,

1926), p. 105.

Feminist Milton

[88]

disposition of his tales (on the sublimity of their chaos rather than the neatness of their perfection),

proper that Montagu should

it is

serve here as the respondent to Miller’s critique.

may

It

be that Miller’s

“How

be reinflected to

“How

Deconstruction Works’’ should

Deconstruction Works

in

Paradise Lost ” in

order to dispel the ideological mist with which his reading clouds Milton’s text.

If,

as Miller insinuates,

deconstruction

is

a

manifes-

of a recently emerging mind-set, a reflex of distinctly modern experience and thinking, it may have little to do with Milton’s poem; it may be just another alien mode of inquiry ill-suited tation

to the poetry of Paradise Lost. tion

a

is

Derridean coinage for

— operating through mind

history,

if,

as

it

would

now

it

seems, deconstruc-

—

way of thinking and valuing may be instead another habit of

a

that in Paradise Lost, at least in

ated with Satan, Milton

by

Or

disfigured forms associ-

its

Not just

scuttle.

the passage cited

Miller, but others with a corresponding concern, interfere

with and subvert one another’s meaning,

as

we

learn

from

a

long

of female interpreters: Lady Mary Chudleigh (1699), Mary

line

Wray

(1714), Eliza

Haywood

(1745),

Lucy Hutton

(1787),

Mary

Wollstonecraft (1792), Jane West (1806), Mary Shelley (1818), Sarah Siddons (1822), and Eliza Bradburn (1828). We learn from these

women

that the strategies

of deconstruction are not always

an end in themselves, devices for destablizing ing

it

sion

and render-

indeterminate; they are often, and more, tactics of subver-

rife

To

a text

with ideological significance.

deconstruct a text

is

to

decode

it,

and decoding

a text

im-

meanings inhere in it beyond those “inscribed on the internal vestibule of the ear”; that oblique discourse, as Derrida writes, “increase[s] the surface of impression and hence the capac8 ity of vibration.” Paradise Lost ambushes us with its slick textual maneuvers. Where Miller sees black, Milton’s early female readplies that

ers see gray, in

accordance with the proposition

of them that “black

Where

is

set forth

not black, nor white so very white.” 9

Miller finds icons of female subjection and fallenness,

these early female readers discern figures of dignity and

Or

again, as Jane

wisdom.

West observes of this “inspired bard,”

“Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy

Chicago

by one

,

trans.

Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of

Press, 1982), pp. xi, xv.

‘Jane West, Letters

to a

Young Lady (Troy and

New

York, 1806),

p. 79.

An we suppose Milton

If

Alternative Perspective

correct in his notions of

“Grace was in her

steps,

heaven

in

[89)

(woman’s elegance J

her eyes,

In every gesture dignity and love”

then

how do

disheveledness and wantonness bear on “his picture

of our general mother in her

where Miller perceives

a knit

state

of innocence

’? 10

of identity between

And

finally,

a character

s

opinions and Milton’s opinions, those female readers perceive

something in the characters themselves, according to Wray and Hutton, circumstantiates what they say. Hannah More baldly states their case: “That being is but a bad authority whom Milton makes proudly to exclaim, ‘The mind is its own

distinction:

place.’”

11

From

view of Milton’s early female readership, the features of deconstructionist discourse described so well by Miller are by Milton aligned with Satan and fallen human conthe point of

sciousness in such a are

endowed with

way

that various characters in Paradise Lost

different extents

of consciousness expanding

outward from Satan and ascending upward toward God. Satan, Adam, Eve, Raphael, Michael, the Son, and his Father they are seven eyes, as it were, each expanding upon by correcting and improving the vision of the other. In a universe of altering con-

—

sciousness,

it

others, not to

And

it is

is

over

folly not to privilege certain perspectives

make

interpretive choices and even second choices.

a special folly to

give fallen parity with unfallen vision,

Satan parity with God. •

Admittedly, Satan’s perspective

now by

the narrator and

contagious, appropriated

is

now by Adam.

It is

also a slippery per-

whenever it finds alteration in the terms for comparison. When compared with one another, Adam and Eve seem unequal, but when both together are seen in relation to the spective, altering

angels, they appear to be equal: “to heav’nly Spirits bright tle

so lively shines

inferior

blance” (IV. 361 -64). Satan

tween 10

different orders

may

/

In

/

Lit-

them Divine resem-

here misjudge relationships be-

of creation, but he also anticipates God’s

Ibid., pp. 28, 29, 90.

"Hannah More, vols.;

London,

Christian Morals (1812), in

1830), IX, 229.

The Works of Hannah More (n

Feminist Milton

[90]

own

description (anterior in time to Satan’s) of man’s creation

and also Raphael’s later description of the potentiality in that creation: “men / With Angels may participate,” says Raphael, “and

from these corporal nutriments perhaps turn

last

in

all

is

conception, not

a generic

sexual difference. According to God,

man was

age” (IV. 567), just as in

Man

our Image,

(VII. 5

at

to Spirit” (V. 493 -94, 496-97). In Raphael’s idiom, as

“man”

God’s,

Your bodies may

/

19-20;

my

/

In

would have

is

his

intended to be:

clearly

own us

let

and

our similitude,

“Man”

italics).

man

denominator

a

“latest

for

Im-

make “Man them

let

rule”

encompasses rather than

“Male he created thee, but thy consort / Female” (VII. 529-30); male and female together are then sent forth to “subdue” the earth and to wield “dominion over it” (VII. 532-43). It is a perfect creation, in every respect answerable to God’s “great Idea” (VII. 557). According to God, man (that is, Adam and Eve) is created in “my (as

Satan

it)

defines sexual difference:

Image, not imparted to the Brute” given exactly what he asked

for, his equal

wish exactly to thy hearts desire”

Adam

(VIII. 441). :

“thy other

has been

self, /

(VIII. 450- 51). If Satan’s per-

spective crosses here with God’s and there with Raphael’s,

only to emphasize the extent to which theirs.

Throughout

the

poem, and

sexes, Satan’s perspective that

is

Thy

it

is

a

it

is

deformation of

on the matter of the found clashing with God’s and with especially

of the angels.

Whatever Satan may

actually think about

her back, to her face he extols ation (see

Adam

“The Argument”

follows

suit.

Eve to

as

Eve and say behind

being above the

Book IX and

IX.

5

/

of cre-

19-20), and

Despite his claim to Raphael that Eve was

created as his “inferiour” (VIII. 541), to Eve’s face

“To me beyond

rest

Compare above

all

living

Adam

says,

Creatures dear”

With both Satan and Adam there seems always to be a discrepancy between what they think of Eve and what they tell her directly, and this discrepancy manifests itself even more boldly in the arguments to individual books where Adam is forever being credited, and in the poetry of the books where most credit seems to go to Eve. Milton allows certain of his characters, chief among them Satan, as well as his narrator, to articulate the theme of woman’s subjection that the poem itself explodes. Satan’s strategy is to employ a rhetoric of equality through (IX. 227-28).

An which he would bring himself feigns to

— and through ity.

equality

— “who

all

our equal?” (V.866)

is

his feigning blurs the Father

and humankind,

[91]

creation under his subjection. Satan

all

know no

Alternative Perspective

and the Son, angels

the orders and degrees of creation, into equal-

Yet “Orders and Degrees,” he also contends,

Over

liberty” (V. 792-93).

this blur

“jarr

not with

of creation Satan would then

assume monarchal rule. If he believes that equals must not reign over equals, and if he wishes to reign, he must delude himself and others into believing that he is their natural superior. Assuming his own superiority to the Son, Satan would also assume the scepter that God has promised eventually to surrender to his Son. Satan himself admits to this strategy of delusion when, returning to Hell, he declares,

“Us,

/

.

.

.

over

Man

/

To

rule, as

over

all

he

should have rul’d” (X.490, 492-93). In Paradise Lost Satan’s demonic arithmetic involves taking two seeming unequals and ,

making them “equal with Gods”

(IV. 525 -26), in contrast

with

who despite their equality and in the interests of community allows Adam the same relationship with her “my Guide / And Head” (IV. 442-43; cf. the

human and humane

calculations of Eve,

—

635-37) I

—

that the

him appoint”

— the

Son

is

assigned with the Angels:

(V.606). Yet Eve’s very posture

“Your Head is

lodged

in

humble shall be exalted, the meek shall inherit the earth as evidenced by the framing device for the last half of Milton’s poem, where the apotheosis of the Son (VII. 182-91) is recapitulated in the apotheosis of the historical Eve (XII. 610-23). The 'art of Paradise Lost, Milton’s early female readership was quick to point out, is the art of shifting perspectives. Thus when paradox

last shall

less

first,

the

—

the vantage changes, perspective,

be

Adam

when

initially

the narrator installs himself in Eve’s

seems

“less fair,

/

Less winning soft,

amiable mild” and then seems to excel Eve “by manly

grace

/

And wisdom”

other hand, Eve

is

(IV. 478-79, 490-91).

initially

“Heav’ns

To Adam, on

last best gift,”

“My

the

Glorie,

Image of my self and dearer half’ (V.19, 29, 95). What had seemed to Satan a slight distance between Adam, Eve, and the angels seems to Adam a mighty gulf, those “who dwell in Heav’n” outstripping his own excellence “so farr” (V. 3 56- 57). If, when Raphael arrives in the Garden, Eve be-

my

Perfection,” “Best

comes

for a while a domestic,

Adam,

in a similar gesture

of hu-

Feminist Milton

[92]

becomes submissive and meek “As to a superior Nature” (V. 3 59-60). Yet it is also Eve who eventually goes off to miliation,

labor, leaving to

Adam

the impropriety of questioning the angel

with increasing audacity.

sions of Eve and later flattery party, Raphael identifies

il’s

sometimes exalted impresof her seem to place Eve in the Devher with altogether different com-

If Satan’s

pany, bestowing on Eve “the holy salutation us’d blest Marie,

/

Long

alter to

second Eve ” (V. 3 86- 87).

The Edenic books of Paradise the words of “The Argument”

Lost to

seem

to

Book V,

belong to Adam. In they are intended to

“who he is, and why his enemy, and whatever else may avail Adam to know.” Raphael is instructed by God to “go” hence and “converse with Adam ” (V. 229— 30). Nevertheless, Adam and Eve both sit down with Raphael; Adam asks questions in their beteach him

mutual edification and enlightenment (V.558ff). Eve attends to the discourse through the celestial battle, through the creation story: “He with his consorted Eve / The storie heard attentive” (VII. 50-51). Only in Book VIII, and only when the discourse enters “on studious thoughts abstruse,” does half,

for their

—

Eve depart and go

forth to labor

among

her fruits and flowers

(40-44). She goes forth not undelighted with the discourse, and certainly not incapable of hearing

and understanding “of what

was high,” but simply preferring Adam to Raphael as a storyteller (48-57) and knowing full well when the discourse extends beyond appropriate boundaries. She retires from her seat “with lowliness Majestic

.

.

.

And

Grace” (42-43), saving herself about to receive, indeed tactfully trying

/

from the rebuke Adam is to save Adam from that rebuke: “Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, / Leave them to God above .../... Heav’n is for thee too high / To know what passes there; be lowlie wise” (167-68, 172-73). Eve is already in possession of the lesson that Adam must learn; she knows when it is time “to know no more,” when to be lowly wise (IV. 637-38), as is made evident to Raphael at least by the adroit timing of her departure. She “sees,” Raphael

my

tells

Adam, “when thou

art seen least

wise” (VIII. 578;

italics).

which have seemed to so many modern readers only a catalog of a culture’s commonplaces about the subordination of women, climax in Adam’s representation of

Books IV through

VIII,

An Eve

Alternative Perspective

as a submissive, subordinate figure

of Adam for holding to such a piece

beliefs.

[93]

and in Raphael’s chiding

Raphael’s words here are of

with his repeated challenges to Adam’s misunderstandings

and misrepresentations. Audaciously calling into question all that God has said about creation, about the perfect match between His Idea and the Son’s execution, Adam complains, “On her bestow’d /Too much of Ornament, in outward shew / Elaborate, of inward less exact” (VIII. 537-39). Adam has pleaded with God

mate of equality, but what he sees is now her seeming ority, now her seeming superiority to him: for a

For well

I

Of Nature

understand her

And inward

in the

prime end

th’ inferiour, in the

Faculties,

inferi-

which most

mind excell,

outward also her resembling less His Image who made both, and less expressing I11

Dominion giv’n O’re other Creatures; yet when approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems

The

character of that

I

And

in her self

compleat, so well to

know

Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, vertuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Looses discount’ nanc’t, and like folly shewes; Authority and Reason on her waite,

As one intended

made consummate all,

first,

Occasionally; and to

not after

Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat Built in her loveliest, and create an

About

her, as a

guard Angelic

awe

plac’d. (VIII.

540-59)

Eve’s earlier confusion over the relationship between the sexes

now Adam’s

confusion, and

it

meets with

a

contracted

brow and

a stern reply:

Accuse not Nature, she hath don her

Do thou but Of Wisdom,

thine,

part;

and be not diffident

she deserts thee not,

if

is

thou

Dismiss not her, when most thou needst her nigh,

Feminist Milton

[94]

By

attributing

overmuch

to things

Less excellent, as thou thy self perceav’st.

For what admir’st thou, what transports thee

An

so,

no doubt, and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, Not thy subjection: weigh with her thy self; outside?

Then Value

fair

.

.

.

.

.

.

with honor thou maist love

Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen What higher in her societie thou findst Attractive,

human,

rational, love

wise

least

.

.

.

still;

In loving thou dost well, in passion not, .

Among

the Beasts

no Mate

which cause thee was found.

for

.

.

for

561-94)

(VIII.

—

“Among unequals what had sought equality in a mate societie / Can sort, what harmonie or true delight?” (VIII. 3 83on the supposition that if there is equality in heaven then 84)

Adam

—

on earth. But God corrects this false surmise: “For none I know / Second to me or like, equal much less” (VIII. 406- 7). Throughout the middle books of Paradise Lost the question has been what if things on earth be like things in heaven, but here the question is turned back on man by God in a way that defines God’s superiority in terms of Adam and Eve’s equality. To be “more equal” than they are, as Eve well understands, is for her to become, as she wants to do in Book IX, a superior to Adam with dominion over him (823-25). When Eve falls, however, she becomes Adam’s inferior and now, surrendering desire for superiority, strives, by implicating Adam in her there should also be equality

to restore the sexes to equality:

fall, .

.

.

“Equal Lot

/

.

.

equal Joy,

.

equal Love” (881-82).

If patriarchal attitudes

after the Fall

who

is

all

and

as its

such attitudes

at instilling

in

their spokesperson:

Ingaging

Of thy

me

to emulate, but short

perfection,

Adam from whose ,

man woman,

consequence they are engendered by

too successful

making her

before the Fall are generated by Satan,

how

shall

attaine,

I

deare side

I

boast

me

sprung.

(IX. 963-65)

An

Alternative Perspective

Impressions of inequality registered by

now

hardened into attitudes

that,

Adam

.../...

equal

to attract

/

Thy

Adornd

before the Fall have

Adam,

confronting

himself will challenge: “was shee made thy

.

.

.

Superior, or but

/

Shee was indeed, and lovely

/

Fall,

and

as its

consequence, Adam’s patri-

archy modulates into misogyny. Eve becomes to

Woman”

Son

the

love, not thy Subjection” (X. 145-46, 151-53).

Indeed, after the

bad

[95]

(X.837)

—

a

Adam

“that

snare that traps, then perverts man,

of misfortune upon him. She is now addressed as a serpent: “Out of my sight, thou Serpent” (X.867). She is also judged to be “crooked by nature” (X.885) and called the “inbringing

sorts

all

When

firmer sex” (X.956).

of

Women

fair

quick to trace chael

Mans

the Fall learns,

human

.

Adam

that

woes all

Adam

Troop” to

those

effeminate slackness

is

shown

(XI. 582, 614), he

/

is

women, whereupon Miwoes

actually derive

from

it

“Man over men / He made not Lord ... I from human free” (XII. 69-71); he learns that the

is

that

he has aligned with Satan

is

in the

grand design of

things to be aligned with Christ, “that destind Seed”

“bruise

“a Beavie

begins” (XI. 834). never really understood, but in the aftermath of

left

woman whom

that fair femal

the world’s

all

What Adam .

.

must remind

him: “From

.

.

.

in a vision

The Serpent” and “achieve

/

who

will

Mankinds deliverance”

At the beginning of Book XI, Adam thinks all is lost by Eve; by the end of Book XII he has learned that the great deliverance yet to come will be owing to “the Womans seed” (XII. 601). Eve, in turn, comes to know that by (XII. 233-35; cf. 326-27).

her “the Promis’d Seed shall

all

restore” (XII. 623) and that she

therefore not only a partner but also a protagonist in the

of creation and

in the

is

mending

ensuing drama of history.

misogyny and female subjection are born out of the anger of the male.” To be more precise, both are attitudes, decidedly Satanic, expressed by Adam before the Fall but quickly checked by God and Raphael, who have had to listen to them. Both attitudes are male, Adamic illusions perpetrated by Satan and punctured by Raphael before they ever beIt

has been said that “both

12

come

a

mind-set, entering the world with the Fall as primary

evidence of

l2

F.

its

deformation. That mind-set

Peczenik, “Fit Help:

27 (1984), 45-

The

is

engendered

in

Egalitarian Marriage in Paradise Lost,'' Mosaic,

Feminist Milton

[96]

males by Satan who, incarnating

makes of them

a snare

and

a trap.

women

and diminishing them, Misogynistic attitudes, no less

than those of male supremacy and female subjection, constitute a

Books XI and XII Milton would clear from human consciousness. If misogyny is Satan’s curse, patriarpart of the debris that in

God’s curse, and both are brutal facts of history. But also, given God’s, Milton's God's, promise to surrender his scepter, misogyny and patriarchy are escapable facts of history. Moreover, they are curses that any apocalyptic historian must eradicate from history, for the retrieval of paradise is by definition a retrieval of chy

is

between the sexes before the Fall. If the intellectual density of Paradise Lost, its textual ambiguity and slippery perspectivism, opens the poem to interpretive confusions, those confusions have also been multiplied and exthe state of equality that pertained

aggerated by the

The tory

critical

history Milton’s

poem

has occasioned.

perspective just presented derives from a part of that his-

— but not the best-known part — and provides

a

point of ref-

erence to which Milton’s male and female readers repeatedly

and varying degrees of attention but also in the shared understanding that Milton’s portrait of women is composed of more than “a barrage of angry words” 13 and that return, with different

words in Paradise Lost are forceful evidence of a determination on the poet’s part to undertake the work of decon-

Eve’s

last

structing dis-equality.

By way of

defining the timidity of Milton’s feminism, but

feminism nonetheless, Christopher Hill has suggested that Milton’s contemporary, Thomas Goodwin, went beyond the poet in arguing that Eve’s being taken from the side of Adam is evidence

Goodwin’s representation of Eve as the mother of all humankind, the first true believer, the first to trust in Christ and thus the one with whom God covenants. “If Goodwin had worked out the impli-

of their sexual equality. In

this regard, Hill stresses

cations of this,” Hill concludes, “it could have subverted the

universally accepted assumptions of male supremacy.” 14

13

See Sandra

Woman

M.

Gilbert and Susan Gubar,

The Madwoman

Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary

London: Yale Univ.

As

it

The Imagination (New Haven and in the Attic:

Press, 1979), p. 210.

M Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 184.

An

Alternative Perspective

happens, the “working out” of such implications

agenda

ton’s

spectives

in Paradise Lost.

on the

In

is

Books IV- IX,

[97)

of Mil-

a part

jostling per-

sexes, this attitude colliding with that one, antici-

pate the studied and unsettling reflections implicit in the narrative

of Books XI and XII

—

from these books by virtue of a curious interplay between them and their scriptural contexts. When this is understood, it becomes possible to differentiate Paradise Lost from the patriarchal and sometimes misogybias nistic of the biblical traditions informing it, and reflections unfolding

simultaneously possible to perceive Paradise Lost as

poem

a

af-

promoting the full humanity of women and revealing through their lives the hidden truth of men’s lives. Like Scripture itself, Milton’s poem begs to be released from its own historical limitations, but more, from the limitations of its convention-bound interpreters for whom Paradise Lost is a “representative” poem, rife with “institutionalized and elabo15 It is instead a poem that acrately metaphorical misogyny .” knowledges and affirms the principles of a feminist hermeneutic: that women are fully human and to be valued as such, and that the experience of women is itself a pathway to understanding and to liberation 16 Milton’s early feminist critics assumed this posture toward his poem, the same posture that some feminists of today are assuming toward the Bible: an attitude of acceptance and affirmation within “a stance of radical suspicion .” If Milton’s sourcebook evinces a diversity of attitudes toward firming

and

.

—

.

.

.

17

women,

Milton’s

poem

does the same, but not without shaking

off culturally conditioned attitudes, challenging them, and taking sides, in the tress,

but destabilizes, the ideologies that support the social or-

der .” 18 At ,5

understanding that “divine revelation does not but-

its

best, feminist criticism

of Milton not only

See Marcia Landy, “Kingship and the Role of

Milton Studies, IV (1972),

5;

Women

attests to

in Paradise Lost,”

and Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman

in the Attic,

p. 368. 16

See Margaret A. Farley, “Feminist Consciousness and the Interpretation of

Scripture,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty phia:

Westminster Press, 1985),

from modern feminist

p. 44.

The

rhetoric here

M. is

Russell (Philadel-

deliberately

criticism; see also Tillie Olsen, Silences

drawn

(London: Virago,

1978), p. 23. 17

The phrase

is

from Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, “Feminist Uses of

Materials,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, p. 55. 18 Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Feminist Interpretation: lation,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, p.

1

18.

A Method

Biblical

of Corre-

Feminist Milton

[98]

his place in prophetic tradition, but also asserts its

own

with that tradition by reinterpreting Paradise Lost

in the light

continuity

of a

continually emerging and expanding critical consciousness. “interpretive suspicion” should thus give way, as tural interpretation, to “a

party without it

full well,

from

Fall

in scrip-

a multiplicity

He may

and revisionary.

of per-

be of the Devil’s

also

of Eve’s party and knows

relates her story in

counterpoint to the tradi-

knowing

and he so

does

hermeneutics of proclamation.”"

Milton recounts the story of the spectives, traditional

it

Its

it,

but he

is

orthodoxy of his own day, because of the sociopolitical implications of Milton’s position, required him to repress. If the seventeenth century is a period of prohibitions, exclusions, imperatives, concealments, silences, and reticences concerning sexuality, as Michel Foucault argues, then Paradise Lost testifies to the Foucauldian thesis that there is really no “historical rupture between the age of repression and the critical anal20 ysis of repression.” In fact, Paradise Lost is evidence that the repression of sexuality is accompanied by a proliferation of discourse concerning sexuality, by the interrogation and problematizing of both human sexuality and the relationship between the sexes. The Edenic books of Milton’s poem are a mosaic of such commonplaces, each of which comes under scrutiny, espetional tale that the

cially the

by-now

quence of the notion that cause she

How

cliched proposition that sexuality

and hence an associate of

Fall

woman

fell first

is

man’s

inferior,

and farther she

is

sin,

is a

conse-

as well as the

not his equal, and that be-

and

to be subservient

silent.

such associations are formed and such hierarchies estab-

one question. Why, by Milton, such associations are broken and the usual hierarchies are inverted is another, very different question. In one of its accounts of creation, the Book of

lished

is

''Susan

Brooks Thistlcthwaite, “Every

Two

Minutes: Battered

Women

and

Feminist Interpretation,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, and Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza, “The Will to Choose or to Reject: Continuing Our Critical

Work,”

in ibid., pp. 100, 132.

^'Michel Foucault,

The

An

Robert Hurley (1978; rpt. New York: Viking Books, 1980), p. 10. For an argument similar to my own that Paradise Lost is less a poem “about man’s relation to God and more the history of sexuality” see Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tcnnenhouse, “The History of Sexuality in Paradise Lost," Representations, forthcoming.

—

Flistory

of Sexuality:

—

Introduction,

trans.

An Genesis

may

Alternative Perspective

[99]

Adam

in the

foster the notion that

God

placed

world-garden and gave him dominion over it when he gave man language and the power of naming before Eve was created (Genesis

2:15,

Book

19-20). If in

343-44 Milton seems bring them to receave

VIII.

to sub-

same tradition (“I / From thee thir Names”), it is a tradition he later modifies when Eve declares, “O flours, / which bred up with tender hand / and gave ye Names” (XI. 273 -77), as if to signal a recognition on Milton’s part that it is a sign of women’s power when “they themselves exercise the power of naming.” 21 In the last books of Paradise Lost, Milton scuttles the notion that “ Adams sin was as no sin in comparison of the sin of Eve .” 22 Before the Fall, Adam may seem to excel Eve, but after the Fall Eve excels Adam. Thus Paradise Lost presents a reversal of the

scribe to the

.

.

I

.

usual pattern. If before the Fall Fall

it is

Eve who gives

life

Adam

gives

life

.

.

to Eve, after the

Adam, who redeems him and hisboth. Eve now empowers Adam to

to

tory and restores Paradise to

become

.

way, finally flouting both tradition and its sexual stereotypes, Milton presents, as Elaine Pagels might say, “a powerful alternative to what we know as orthodox Christian tradition.” 23 It is as if Milton designed the Edenic books of Paradise Lost as an inversion of the idea that man and woman, though equal before the Fall, lost their equality as a consequence and curse of it, with men assuming despotic rule over women. Through the demonic perspective on Adam and Eve afforded by Satan (they seem unequal), and through the blinkered vision of Adam that, even before the Fall, Raphael must correct, Milton achieves in Books IV-VIII the illusion of inequality between the sexes. In the books dealing with the aftersee himself and

himself. In this

So K. K. Ruthven argues without reference to Milton in Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 3. See also Adrienne Munich, “Notorious Signs, Feminist Criticism, and Literary Tradition,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 240. “See Richard Capel, Tentations: Their Nature, Danger, Cure (2 vols.; London, 1650), p. 89. Cf. Landy, “Kingship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost," p. 17: “One assumes that Eve’s intelligence, which was inferior to Adam’s, has become correspondingly debased in its lower degree.” 23 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 21

Feminist Milton

[ioo]

math of the

Fall,

turning the Genesis tradition upside down, Mil-

ton presses us toward a perception of the equality of the sexes. Indeed, Milton presses so hard that John Collier

“The

serve:

true hero of any story

essential thing, the

Lost

deed which

is

is

who

does the

d’etre.

Paradise

surely the one

the story’s raison

ob-

to

the story of the loss of Paradise and the attainment of the

is

— and

knowledge of good and evil one and gains for us the other Paradise Lost,

its

the sexes, signal

is

the character

Eve.’’

24

The

who

loses the

essential features

of

transposition of values and democratization of its

status as a prophetic text

the seventeenth century as a discourse era,”

moved

is

when according

more

and

its

existence in

characteristic

of

to Foucault, “sex, the revelation

the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a

of “our truth,

new day

to

come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together.” 25 It is generally acknowledged that Paradise Lost aspired to and was almost immediately accorded epic status; one thinks of Dryden’s famous epigram accompanying the 1688 edition o {Paradise Lost, “Three poets in three distant Ages born,” which is little more than a carving of Samuel Barrow’s sentiments on a cherry

One

stone.

dise Lost tal

should also pause to think what

it

meant

recognized as an epic and of the short-term political capi-

to be gained

by Milton from having

Epic served Milton

as a

mask,

a

Paradise Lost so perceived.

cloak of protection, and this use

of epic becomes abundantly evident when

we

for readers, if not for writers,

epic never

was

time,” says Bakhtin;

a it

of epic even

poem about contained no

how

perceive just

representative Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of epic

“The

have Para-

to

and was

is

in Milton’s

own

the present, about

its

day.

own

windows opening upon

the

present or the future. Rather, this supposedly “congealed and

half-moribund genre” tion,

a reservoir for

is

wholly

reliant

“commonly

upon custom and

tradi-

held evaluation and point of

zone and a field for valorized perception,” albeit “old and almost ossified.” If, as Bakhtin would have it, “contemporaneity cannot become an object of representation for the view”;

it

.

24

“a

is

.

.

John Collier, Milton’s “ Paradise Lost”: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (New York: Knopf, 1973), p. xi. 25 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 7.

’

An

Alternative Perspective

high genres,” either tragedy or epic

26 ,

[101]

those genres are, for Mil-

ton’s purposes and for the purposes of those conspiring with him,

the perfect

mask

need not be, but could become,

when

artistic

and diverting censorship. Epic

for detouring

a

subterfuge, especially at a time

representations were increasingly mirroring con-

temporary reality. The prophetic casting of Milton’s poem allows for such intrusions and makes of the poem’s title a metaphor for contemporary history. Milton’s choices of epic and tragedy for his last

poems may seem

like a distancing

avoidance of the present, an embrace of the past narratives that inform these

poems

operation

— but the

— an

biblical

are simultaneously history

and prophecy and hence true both of their own times and of later times, with Genesis, Judges, the Gospels, and especially the Apocalypse, which serves all these poems as a subtext, harboring the myths, however traditional, that in Milton’s day and by Milton himself were being used to stand orthodoxy on its head. For Milton, “epic and tragic are but whole and part ”; 27 through his epic of the past we glimpse the tragedy of the present. Given the epic pretensions of Paradise Lost it is no surprise to ,

They

find patriarchal or misogynistic attitudes.

are staples of the

world of epic poetry; part of the epic formula, they are Milton’s bogie, as much a bugbear to him as to militantly masculine

his later

female readership. They are the rude contrivance for

moving, or

Mary

in the case

of Milton for moving beyond, something.

Shelley might be credited with this perception in view of

the very different generic structures she gives to the

ond

first

editions of her Miltonic novel Frankenstein, but

—

and secstill

she

now of prophmerely implies through her symbolic structures that to which her husband gives precise, ecy and now of epic

—

powerful articulation: “The distorted notions” of tradition, literary and theological, “which Dante and his rival Milton have 26

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1981), pp. 13, 14, 16, 19, 28, 38; see also pp. 3, 16. Armstrong and Tennenhouse See Mikhail Bakhtin,

offer the appropriate rejoinder here:

“By

displacing

.

.

.

traditional literary ideals

Milton makes them critique the very ideology with which they are inscribed” (“The History of Sexuality in Paradise Lost," forthcoming). 27 James Elphinston, Education, in Four Books (London, 1763), p. 81.

onto

a prehistorical past,

[

Feminist Milton

102]

idealised,

are

merely the mask and the mantle

in

which these

walk through eternity enveloped and disguised.” In this declaration, Percy Bysshe Shelley alerts us to “the distinction which must have subsisted,” albeit in different degrees of con28 sciousness, “between their own creeds and that of the people .” That perception had become a theme in feminist criticism of Milton early on, and given the prophetic moorings of Paradise Lost it should come as no surprise that privilege of place, in this poem, is great poets

accorded to Eve.

For too long dise Lost

such

a

—

we

have been asking the wrong questions of Para-

who

for example,

poem

will

by

is its

hero?

number of heroic

definition have a

rayed so as to force the reader through

ward

this character

then that one.

— instead of positing

The

a

that

types ar-

sequence of attitudes to-

real

question here

How

is:

does Milton manage and direct our perceptions of heroism in Par-

of Satan, to apply the theorem of Hans

adise Lost ? In the instance

Robert Jauss, Milton

is

engaged

in a process

of “initiating but

then refusing or ironizing the identification the spectator desires

and expects,” whereas

in the case

to sabotage the identification will secure

29 .

That

is,

if

of Eve, Milton seems

with her that eventually

“woman’s

silence

initially

his

and absence

poem the

is

norm ,” 30 in Milton’s representation of Eve, normal expectations of women, culturally established, are observed only to be broken. Here we see in bold relief the norm-breaking function that typifies Paradise Lost. In the process, the cliches

lusions, so to speak

—

are dispelled,

of culture

—

its il-

opening the way for the Ro-

mantic perception that with Milton the dark clouds of ignorance are rolled into the distance.

This strategy of subversion, so pervasive

in Paradise Lost,

en-

abled readers of the poem, from the very beginning and despite the

poem’s misogynistic signatures,

to question

whether Milton’s

^See The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970), p. 537. 2 'See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 157, but see also pp. 152-82. ^’See Ructher, “Feminist Interpretation,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, p.

1

13.

See also the application of such an argument to Milton’s

tine Froula, cal Inquiry,

“When Eve Reads

Milton:

Undoing

10 (1983), 32 i“ 47 esp. p. 338. .

the Canonical

poem by

Chris-

Economy,”

Criti-

An

Alternative Perspective

text really “represents the conversion

and whether

its

accents actually

fall

of Eve to orthodoxy’’ 31

on Eve’s secondariness and

self-subordination, whether Paradise Lost the

misogyny

in the Bible.

(103]

is

of

really a boldfacing

The commonplaces

are there in

abun-

books leading up to the Fall, but even here they come under review, and in the books dealing with the aftermath of the Fall many of the same commonplaces are deftly eroded. Surely Eve’s final speech is no evidence for, but only a subversion of, the argument that Milton violently imposes silence on the female sex while also excising a female readership from his poem. It is a cliche that women always get the last word, and it is cliche that, in a startling way, Milton chooses to honor: Eve who has been silent begins to talk, and her talk silences Adam. We need to remember that Milton is a biblical poet whose resources are those of biblical narrative art, and thereupon we should recall with Robert Alter that “when someone’s silence is actually isolated for dance

in the

narration,

we may

infer that the refusal or avoidance

itself a significant link in the

concatenation of the

Grigori Kozintsev remarks, “In pates:

moments of

silence are

plot,’’

POETRY WORD

sometimes more

of speech 32

is

or, as

only antici-

significant

{han

the lines themselves.” 33 Correspondingly, expected, enforced

si-

when broken makes its own symbolic point. The exquisite poetry of Eve’s final speech, a sonnet, is fully responsive to Michael’s urging: “Thy going is not lonely, with thee goes / Thy husband, him to follow thou art bound; / Where he abides think there thy native soil” (XI. 290-92). The sonnet may lence

have been,

in the Renaissance,

gender-oriented and biased, and

might seem to be an instance of Eve’s appropriation of male discourse. Within the perspective afforded by his poem, however, Milton devises a fiction wherein

from one perspective

these lines

Eve, in her love song of Book IV, originates turns to in

Book XII and through which

a

genre that she re-

she utters the

last

spoken

words of Paradise Lost, which echo her earlier love song to Adam as well as their morning hymn to God, and contrast with Satan’s

79

“When Eve Reads

31

Froula,

32

Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry

Milton,”

p. 326.

(New York:

Basic Books, 1985),

p.

-

33

Grigori Kozintsev, “King Lear”: The Space of Tragedy, trans. tosh (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 248.

Mary Mackin-

Feminist Milton

[104]

when

perversion of the sonnet All the genres,

monic or

in

Book

X

34 he returns to Hell.

has been suggested, can be deformed by de-

it

fallen consciousness,

but they also have their nobler

form of the Petrarchan sonnet we may place Eve’s love sonnet to Adam from Book IV, even as we recognize (with Barbara Lewalski) that in Books V-VIII Adam complicates and elaborates Eve’s literary creations as if to raise “to higher perfection the several literary forms Eve versions, so that over and against the debased

invents.’’

35

In the concluding

books of the poem, however,

this strategy is

reversed: in contrast to Eve’s lyrics which, religious in nature,

embody

redemptive hope and ascribe to Eve herself a redemp-

a

tive role in history,

Adam’s

tragic laments articulate despair. “In

prelapsarian Eden,” Lewalski explains,

“Eve invented the love

and Adam raised the kind to its highest perfection. ... fallen world,” on the other hand, “Adam inaugurates the

lyric

In the

tragic

lament-complaint, while Eve transforms and perfects the kind.”

Book XII

Reverting in

Book

IV,

Eve

exhibits,

ferent inventions

of

to the sonnet

through

fallen

form she had invented

their juxtaposition, the

and unfallen consciousness,

in

very dif-

as well as

the capacity of fallen forms to be restored, even exalted, through their elevation to the

key of prophecy. Eve’s

sonnet culmi-

last

Chosen Seed. Lewalski makes the point exactly: “Eve, who composed the first love lyric in Eden, reclaims the genre from its Petrarchan perversions by Satan. When Eve awakens from her prophetic dream she voices a

nates in the prophecy of the

.

.

.

.

.

.

,

And more,

Lewalski

locates in Eve’s love sonnet a possible biblical reference:

“Whither

love

poem

appropriate to the fallen world.”

thou goest,

Where thou

will go;

I

and where thou lodgest,

diest, will

I

die,

passage from Ruth (1:16-17)

and there will is

I

I

will lodge.

.

.

.

be buried.” 36 This

probably playing against another

*See the illuminating observations by Anna K. Nardo, Milton’s Sonnets and the Ideal of Community (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 173-74, as well as the forthcoming study by S. K. Heninger, The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance, where it is argued that the sonnet is the form for interrogating orthodoxies. '"Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, p. 218, but also

pp. 24, 200-201. ^Ibid., pp. 252, 277.

An from Judges

(4:8): “If

Alternative Perspective

thou wilt go with me, then

thou wilt not go with me, then

I

I

1 1

05

1

will go; but if

will not go. " In Eve’s sonnet the

secular modulates into the sacred. Breaking in

upon the

little

form and little world of the sonnet, etched in its coda, is the prophecy and epic drama of redemption: Eve utters the prophecy, and she performs in the epic drama as protagonist. Eve’s fourteen lines of iambic pentameter verse are as unen-

cumbered by sonnet

rule as

Eve

now unencumbered by

is

conventions of epic precedent or male

and she speaks .

.

.

freely.

Her

goe” (XII. 610, 615),

meant

rule.

She

is

free to speak,

verses contain but one rhyme,

Hannah More must have “Go know, like Eve.’’' With 7

their fourteen-line sonnet signature, these verses are a

form had become the forum

frustrations, his concerns

Here the

zations.

for

and complaints,

“.

stay here; without thee here to stay,

me

615-18).

/

Art

all

.

.

/ Is

his / story to

idoli-

modulate

with thee to go, to

things under heaven,

These words,

and

with Milton exchanging

tables are turned,

into her / story and her celebration:

reminder

man’s anxieties and

his idealisms

man’s voice for woman’s and thus allowing

thou to

“know

a fact that

to record in her injunction

that their

the

/ Is

to

go hence unwillingly; all

places thou” (XII.

one way so reminiscent of John epitomize what must have been for

in

Donne’s Songs and Sonets, Milton, as it was for others in his time, the ideal reciprocity of a marriage: “Every wife should be to her husband, as Evah was to Adam, a whole world of women; and every husband should be to 38 The his wife, as Adam was to Evah, a whole world of men.” words of Eve, moreover, sit uneasily against the flats and sharps, the banalities and pieties, of Adam’s preceding speech, “Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best” (XII. 561), and the information with which these words are framed makes clear that they are a

sloughing off rather than

Adam may Dreams”

have

a

sanctioning of cultural prejudice.

his visions, but

(XII. 595), enabling

Eve

has likewise her “gentle

both to leave Paradise “not discon-

“though sorrowing, yet in peace” (XII. 1 13, 117). The very dream that in our century has seemed to be a device for solate” and,

37

Hannah More, “The Lady and

Hannah More

(11 vols.;

^William Seeker,

A

London,

the Pye; or,

1830),

Wedding-Ring Fit

II,

Know

Thyself,” in The Works of

8.

for the

Finger (London, 1661), p. 31.

Feminist Milton

[io6]

demeaning Eve was of

in this “mistress

Nothing

that

he has heard

what thou

is

century taken as

in the eighteenth

.

.

Adam

Paradise ...

.

has seen

is

all is

a sign that

harmony within.” 39

to be shielded

from Eve;

that

all

to be shared with her: “Let her with thee partake

hast heard” (XII. 598).

makes no sense

It

poem

gether untrue to the sense of Milton’s

—

— and

is

alto-

to argue that Mil-

ton deliberately excludes Eve from the conversation between

Adam

and Raphael, and

Eve to it would

between

later

Adam

and Michael, be-

would be perwomen’s discourse is

cause “for

participate in these dialogues

verse, for

violate the premise that

essentially different

from man’s

discourse, that

it is

at best a

coun-

40

must be checked, restrained, and limited.” The pressures of the last books of Paradise Lost lead to other concluterfeit

that

sions,

and

specifically to the conclusion that while such argu-

ments may have held sway in the dominant culture of Milton’s own day, and while to challenge them may have been an affront to that culture, Milton on these issues certainly enters into a contentious relationship with his culture is not beyond such perversity and therefore not beyond violating such premises. It is

—

just such cultural restraints that

have her

Eve

violates, that

Milton would

violate.

Here, in the conclusion to Paradise Lost the archly misogynistic ,

words from

Timothy

play: “Let a

and ironically brought into silence with all submissiveness. I per-

mit

to

1

woman learn in no woman to teach or

keep

silent”

Adam

(2:11-12).

have authority over me: she

The poem approaches

awakening Eve and finding

meek submission” XII), but the falls

are clearly

Adam

service,

(XII.

submission

and Eve

596-97; is

alike.

and understanding

—

to

period with

her spirits compos’d

To Book /

“The Argument” to husband than to a fate that be-

cf.

less to a

It is

“all

its

is

submission to mutual cooperation, a selfless

submission to and expres-

sion of love in accordance with the Blakean adage that the sublimest act

is

to put another before you. Eve’s

is

an expression of

love without subjection and not subject to the culturally limited, J9

Samuel Richardson

to

Lady Bradshaigh

dence of Samuel Richardson, ed.

Anna

Laetitia

(22 July 1750), in

Barbauld

(6 vols.;

The CorresponLondon, 1804),

VI, 26.

^Herman

Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska

Press, 1983), p. 143.

•

An

Alternative Perspective

[107]

and limiting, conventions of the usual sonnet. Moreover, though Eve’s eyes have been “drencht” for sleep, it is for “sleep” with vision such as

Adam

experienced “while Shee to

life

was formd”

(XI. 367-69):

Mine eyes he

clos’d up, but op’n left the Cell

Of Fancic my

internal sight,

Abstract as in a transe

.

.

.

I

by which saw. (VIII. 460-62;

my

italics)

Eve here experiences a vision of which she never wearies and to which, were the patriarchal tradition really ruling Milton, Eve would never have been privy, nor for that matter would “Prophetic Anna, warn’d / By Vision” have been intruded upon the story of Paradise Regained, where,

who

“spake,

to

that present stood”

all

/

we

are reminded, she

Before the Altar and the vested (1.

Priest,

/

.

.

is .

one

[and]

5 25 -58).

Eve’s final words are no evidence

at all

of “Milton’s silencing

and voiding female creativity,” or of his “emphatic suppression” of women within the epic tradition. 41 On the contrary, Eve’s viissue a response, unlike those responses hazarded

sion has as

its

by Adam,

that requires

no correction: “By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore” (XII. 623). These are the last spoken words of the poem, and they cause Adam (in a deft inversion of the apostle Paul’s admonition “She is to keep silent”) to fall silent himself: “So spake our Mother Eve, and Adam heard / Well pleas’d,

but answer’d not” (XII. 624-25). This

moment

in the history

ways assigned

an extraordinary

is

of epic poetry, where the

last

speech

is

al-

one of the gods or to the hero or a stand-in for him, who has privilege of place: Priam in the Iliad, or Aeneas, or Dante, or Godfrey; Athena in the Odyssey, or Nature in The Faerie Queene. In Spenser’s poem, Nature’s words are not only the last words; they also pertain to last things. But in Milton’s poem Eve’s last words point into the midst of time, at the turning point of

human

tory. Like

and 4l

ter’s

history; they celebrate a resurrection in time, in his-

Anna

insight,

Froula,

to

in Paradise Regained,

and the prototype of

“When Eve Reads

Specter: Milton’s

Woolf?”

Critical Inquiry

Milton,”

Bogey Writ ,

n

(1984).

1

women who

p. 338; see also

Small; or, 75

Eve, favored with vision

Why

are so favored,

is

Christine Froula, “PechIs

He

Afraid of Virginia

Feminist Milton

[io8]

the prophet of the promised seed and the prophet too, like

Mary

Magdalene in the Gospels of Mark and John, of the Resurrection. Milton must mean for us to remember that “women have proph42 esied and thereby attained rule over men, land, and people.” If it can be said that the last books of Paradise Lost contain an apocalypse for Adam, it should be allowed that those same books culand in the aperqu minate in the apotheosis of the historical Eve

—

that “the Christian

way of relating

achieves male-female equality

through mutual submission.” 43 Eve’s

last

speech, the prophecy in the poem’s coda, should also

remind us that at the time Paradise Lost was being brought to completion the Quakers were awarding women equality with men and crediting both sexes with the capacity for prophesying. Doris Mary Stenton remembers that Mary Cary was among the

numerous women who, during

the revolutionary years, joined

with their male counterparts in the interpretation of dark prophe-

and also in foretelling future events. 44 Moreover (and no less than should be Milton’s Eve), Cary is remembered for exemplicies

fying in the aftermath of the Revolution the following

words of

“Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). Lewalski remarks of Adam and Eve in the concluding books of Paradise Lost, “Between them [they] embody the two kinds of prophecy specified in Joel” and testify to the promise “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and daughters shall prophesy.” 45 The appropriate supplement to and extension of Lewalski’s gloss is afforded by Mary Cary in her insistence that “this prophecie is clearly a prophecie of this time,” when both sexes are now prophesying, when what the prophet Joel:

.

Joel

says

of

women

prophesying

is

enough measure to signal that “the time onely men, but women shall prophesie

.

.

occurring in significant is .

coming, when .

.

,

.

.

.

not

even servants and

42

quote from Martin Luther, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (55 vols.; St. Louis; Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-76), XL, I

390 43

.

Virginia

ville:

Ramsay Mollenkott, Women, Men, and

Abingdon,

the Bible (1977; rpt.

Nash-

1981), p. 33.

Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: George and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 174-75. 44

Doris

4S

Lewalski, "Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric oj Literary Forms,

p.

259.

Allen

An handmaids.” Cary says ets

—

a

Alternative Perspective

when

that

all

the Lord’s people are proph-

Miltonic idealism from Areopagitica on

throw of Antichrist and

his

— “the

total

over-

ruin shall suddenly be .” 46

finall

Milton’s foregrounding of Eve,

|i09|

in the

conclusion to Paradise Lost,

just another indication of how the last

books of the poem open upon the history of his own time. These books use history as a way out of history, and they are yet another way of focusing the apocalyptic promise that is not dead but simply postponed. A once-imminent apocalypse is still impending. is

The

books of Paradise Lost, together with Book VI, have often seemed to harbor political content and therefore to give last

access to such content otherwise hidden, but

still

environing books of Milton’s poem. In these contain “the distillation of

and are written by

a

.

.

.

pervasive, in the

last

books

— which

decades of thinking about politics”

revolutionary, of the revolution, for the rev-

them

Book

image in art of 47 Milton the prose writer and poet their necessary illusions” converge. Polemics invades poetry; the poem opens upon the history of Milton’s own time (the Civil War and-its dispiriting consequences), but it also opens itself to apocalyptic encroachments through which we learn to see with Adam and Eve “the haphaz” ardness of history within the fixed framework of eschatology. 4H Book XI begins and ends with murmurings of apocalypse, and Book XII renews apocalyptic hopes of “New Heav’ns, new

olutionaries, giving

here, as in

VI, “an

—

Earth” (549). Book XI begins with Milton’s identifying Christ as an angel of the apocalypse, and Book XII ends with a renewal of

hope that a time will come when people can wipe forever from their eyes. Then current notions of apoca-

the apocalyptic the tears

^See by Mary Cary both A New and More Exact Mappe; or, Description of New Jerusalems Glory (London, 1651), pp. 236, 238, and A Word in Season to the Kingand differently dom of England (London, 1647), p. 5. Bakhtin thinks differently from people of Milton’s own time: “Epic prophecy is realized wholly within the it does not touch the reader and his real time” limits of the absolute past

—

.

.

.

;

(Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 47

Bob Hodge,

guage, and Society

p. 31).

“Satan and the Revolution of the Saints,” in Literature, Lanin

England, 1580-1680 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan; Totowa,

and Noble, 1981), pp. 188, 199. “ G. K. Hunter, Paradise Lost" (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982),

N.J.: Barnes 48

153

-

p.

Feminist Milton

[iio]

clamor and upheaval modulate into the idea of the apocalypse as an unveiling, a cleansing of the senses, a removing of film from the eyes. Apocalypse by revolution here modulates

lyptic

into an apocalypse of mind,

makes

a

new

which instead of voiding history

history possible.

On the basis of these books, some of his readers may have proclaimed that Milton was no millenarian, but others perceived that

“Milton was distinguished not by the martyr’s death but by that

which implies

a loftier

heroism, the martyr’s

life,”

and that espe-

books of Paradise Lost, as Frederick Denison Maurice declares, Milton reached “the state of a mind at rest, and harmonized; not from perceiving so little that it cannot understand the grounds of scepticism, but from knowing so much that .” 49 The driving motions it comprehends how they are satisfied in the last books of Paradise Lost are all toward Paradise restored: “What though lost Paradise the song sustain’d / Higher, heartfelt, than Paradise regained," and as Jane Adams makes abundantly clear in her Miltonic imitations, amid all the sorrow in these books is a triumph song, “a Triumph sung by Eve ." 50 Books XI and XII, in which many women vested an interest, were the books of which a male readership by and large would divest the poem; the books in which female readers found ideological mirrorings were the ones a male readership would muffle. Anna Seward writes tellingly of their critical history and asks a cially in the final

«

teasing question about

The .

.

.

last

it:

books of Milton’s great work

by universal testimony, comparison with all the others, ex-

heavy, dull, and prosing, in

are,

which has also great inferiority. What should we think of a critic who was to declare that those, so much less poetical books, had dissolved the enchantment of that work? who was,

cept the sixth,

—

therefore, to spurn the Paradise Lost ?

49

See The

New

51

Monthly Magazine, (1834), 41, and for Maurice’s comment (dated 1828), see Leslie A. Marchand, The Athenaeum: A Minor of Victorian Culture (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941), p. 253. ^’See Elphinston, Education, p. 80, and Adams, Miscellany Poems (Glasgow, 1734), pp. 160-61 (my italics). Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807 (6 vols.; Edinburgh, 1811), IV, 366. These are the books of Paradise Lost, however, that the Rev. J. Newton called to the attention of Hannah More (see William Roberts, 11

i

An

Alternative Perspective

1

1

[

1

]

The same history is reported, and versions of the same question come tumbling forth, in a recent article by Stanley Fish, who by no means spurning the poem does seem to chide those who now overvalue or revalue these books tion of them. For Fish,

it

is

in the face

of history’s devalua-

not that they are “wrong” in their

revaluation (their evaluations are “inevitable”),

it

is

just that the

“up-grading” of these “orphaned books,” their release from an “interpretive limbo” and “elevation ... to their present place of

honor,” can be attributed to

who

cal history,

and for

whom

ognized and

who do

and sort critiare not conscious of “the dates of its events,” critics

“the rehabilitation of

not

sift

Books XI and XII

whom

[is]

a rec-

books respond to formalist and structuralist notions of interpretation and are redeemable only when they are “transmuted into the timeless world of myth” and translated into “a theological pattern” involving religious education and experience 52 Because Fish’s critical history is an unwitting paraphrase and to some extent a translation of Seward’s because it implies that until recently the critical history of Milton is one dull round playing itself over and over again, and thus eschews just that history which we have official project,” for

the

.

—

been reviewing

—

his essay requires that

points up the risks entailed uncritically

when

a

we

linger over

it.

It

also

feminist criticism aligns itself

with certain versions of new historicism and affective

stylistics.

In terms

of setting an agenda for interpretation, few will want

to challenge the

importance that Fish attaches

to the critical his-

tory of -Paradise Lost, a history that he describes not as “a change

of states

— from wrong

to right” but as “a succession

of develop-

ing norms, perspectives, possibilities, alternatives,” and that he and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More [4 vols.; London, 1834I, III, 7) and that John Aikin brings before his daughter (see Lucy Aikin, Memoir ofJohn Aikin [Philadelphia, 1824], p. 190). The hold of these books on the female poetic imagination is illustrated by Jane West’s The Mother: A Poem, in

Memoirs of

the Life

Five Books (London, 1809),

p. 76. It is

noteworthy, too, that the visions of death

and of the flood from Book XI were among the first passages from Paradise Lost to be anthologized; see James Greenwood, The Virgin Muse. Being a Collection of Designed for the Use of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, at Schools (London, Poems .

.

.

1717), pp. 21, 23.

See Stanley Fish’s “Transmuting the Lump: ‘Paradise Lost,’ 1942-1982,” in Literature and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies, ed. Gary Saul 52

Morson

(Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 33, 35, 41, 49, 53.

[

1 1

Feminist Milton

2]

accordingly defines not in terms of “successes and failures” but in

terms of “categories of understanding that

make

available the object

of our attention.”

each generation

in

And

there will prob-

grumbling over the proposition that criticism is enabling, that we should know its history, and hence its premises, as well as the political situation of its writers and readers, so that we can describe its relationship to what it succeeds, whether ably be

little

one “of confirmation, challenge, modifications, [or] reversal.” But there will be disapproving and even perhaps parting glances when it becomes evident that Fish takes too easy a paradigm from Social Darwinism as the model for his “history” of criticism: what survives is most fit, especially if it survives within an elitist community of academic (and male) critics. As Alastair it is

53

Fowler complains, “Resort

to the reader

may

.

.

.

lead to a highly

invidious elitism.” 54

few (as he would have it) crucial years, 1942-82, and then to even fewer craftily selected individuals. Fish is unaware that the phase of criticism on which he reports so perceptively and so shrewdly is a repetition of a much earlier one, not necessarily in a finer key. He also seems unaware that in the eighteenth century there are two separate, distinct, and competing interpretive traditions in place for these books, and that not only in his own generation but also in the preceding one, represented by F. R. Leavis and C. S. Lewis, there is ideological blockage and silencing even as Books XI and XII become an object of critical attention. No critical posture is free of ideology, least of all those that pretend to be free. When Books XI and XII are declared to be dull, boring, tedious, and unreadable we may be encountering in the guise of aesthetic judgment what Roland Barthes describes as “the ultimate censorship,” which “does not consist in banning but in unduly fosFish’s “history”

is

narrowly construed, circumscribed to

.

.

.

bogged down

tering, in maintaining, retaining, stifling, getting in

.

.

.

stereotypes, in taking for nourishment only the received

word of others, is

the repetitious matter of

just such declarations that

53

a

women

common

readers

first,

opinion.” 55

It

then the Ro-

Ibid., pp. 33, 37.

“Alastair Fowler,

“The

Selection of Literary Constructs,”

New

Literary His-

tory,

7 (1975), 45“Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier /Loyola, trans. Richard Miller

and Wang, 1976),

p.

126.

Correspondingly, these

(New York: Hill books of Paradise Lost may in-

•

1 ,

An mantic

moved

critics,

Alternative Perspective

1

1

[

3

what we witness in the these books is one critical tradi-

against. Indeed,

history of criticism pertaining to tion fronting another.

Even

of desert,

stretch

whom

for those to it

was

were thought

with an

a desert

integral to Milton’s plan

once seemed

Paradise Lost

Books XI and

oasis.

of conjoining the

like a

XII,

with the Restora-

Fall

encompass the interrelated parts of a theological system without which there would be no “repose,” no termination proper and complete. 56 It was not the “story” that mattered in these books so much as the “poetry” of history and the “politics” of poetry, with these books seeming first to invite,

tion,

to

then to defy, the notion that political concerns militate against

As Bentley complained, but as Newton was quick

books may not end

poetic genius.

these

in a blaze,

to observe they are “the

same ocean not in

its full

ray as

man

.

.

it

is

.

now

ebbing and retreating.

blaze of meridian glory;

setting.”

57

now

the

same

sun, but

shines with a gentler

finely “representative

of the State of

... in the fallen world,” and so forthright in their represen-

of “the History of mankind,” these books caused Cole-

tation

ridge to say a century carefully read it is,

So

it

It is

wish the Paradise Lost were more

later: “I

and studied than

I

can see any ground for believing

especially those parts which, for the habit of always looking

for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at

Adam’s

vision of future events in the

Coleridge here rides the wave of

new

a

all,

—

nth and

as for

example,

12th books.” 58

understanding of Books

XI and XII that had taken hold in the Romantic period. Romantic criticism was acutely aware of the quick dismissal of these books by some earlier readers. Books XI and XII had been represented as tiresome and dull, dreary in their outlook, defective in their artistry,

hence

“fallfing] short

majesty of the rest.” 59 Yet even

if

of the sublimity and

Joseph Addison,

Newton, and Samuel Johnson were united

Thomas

in their objection to

deed contain what Barthes calls the “ultimate subversion," which “does not conbut in inventing a paradoxical sist in saying what shocks public opinion .

discourse: invention (and not provocation)

.

.

is a

.

.

.

revolutionary act.”

^See the comments by DeQuincey and Landor

in

The Romantics on Milton

pp. 318, 509. 57

See both Milton’s “Paradise Lost," ed. Richard Bentley (London, 1732),

468, and

“

Paradise Lost," ed.

Thomas Newton

5S

The Romantics on Milton, pp. 242, 245.

59

See

“

Paradise Lost," ed.

Newton,

II,

431.

(2 vols.;

London,

1749),

II,

p.

432.

4

[

1 1

Feminist Milton

j

books and in their larger critical objective of neutralizing or, more exactly, emptying Milton’s politics from his poetry, they do not signal a united front of opposition to these books. There is in the eighteenth century a contrary tradition of interpretation. First, as a prophecy these books were thought to exhibit Milton’s consummate literary art and to be of a piece with the tradition of “predictive Poetry, in which the greatest Epic Writers have exthese

celled”; if not

always equal to their subject, their subject

theless the greatest

is

never-

of all, the coming of Christ, with these books

gathering into themselves

all

the prophecies thereof. 60 Second,

by Voltaire, were celebrated for “the beautifulness” of their invention, for their powerful representation of the real world and their grasping toward the restoration of mutilated truth. 61 These books, in which Milton “has ingeniously introduced Michael foretelling the blindness of the human mind,” seemed to be about the visionary faculty how it is impaired and how restored and also to be an exfoliation of the premise that revelation and truth cling to the same root, 62 as well as an underscoring of the fact that the story of Adam and Eve is finally the story of revelation. Third, although these books speak in whispers, they appeared to unfold by historical analogy and so to have a political aspect to them. Here Milton, in imitation of his Virgilian model, is thought by some to be writing “a history of the times” to be “hint[ing] at those times,” in which he had so great a share, “both as a writer and an actor.” Indeed, in the eighthese books, so admired

—

—

—

teenth century the

twelfth book,

lude to

.

.

.

is |

Nimrod

passage,

at

the beginning of the

reported to have “always been supposed to

Milton’s]

poems of which they

own

times.”

63

No

less

than

some

al-

later

are the harbinger, these books, in their

and politics, erode both epic and Christian ridding the world of its encrusted political, social, and re-

eliding of history pieties,

ligious orthodoxies

by deliberately perplexing them within

a sys-

tem of calculated contradictions. “|T]hen reigning notions of the Apthorp, Discourses on Prophecy (2 vols.; London, 1786), I, 315. See Francis Peck, New Memoirs of the Life and Works ofJohn Milton (London,

“’See East 61

1740), pp. 195, 199. 62

See the

anonymous

Observations on

Some Sermons

Lately Preached by Sundry

Divines (London, 1762), pp. 30-31; see also pp. 48, 51. 63 See Memoirs of 'Thomas Hollis comp. Francis Blackburne (2 vols.; London, ,

1780),

II,

622, 625.

As

here,

some

also disapprove

of such allegorizing.

5

An

Alternative Perspective

(

1

1

1

Deity,” eroded by intentional inconsistencies and vacillations of

mind, are “continually and instinctively” intruded upon by Milton’s own “higher notions of the Great First Cause,” so that “judging by what he did in

his

own

reviewer ot the nineteenth century,

would have been

that he ours.”'’

4

To

these books, cal

a leader

day,” says one

“we have

anonymous

a right to

of the most

liberal

conclude

opinions in

align one’s poetry with Milton’s, particularly with

was

to align

and theological;

it

it

was

with

of subversion,

a tradition

to invest poetry

— ideology.

with

politi-

— not divest

it

of

Books XI and

XII, Milton’s epic-prophecy within an epic-

prophecy, Paradise Lost

in miniature,

afforded the generic model

two-book poem to which Milton gives his name, for Wordsworth’s Prelude (initially a two-book poem expanded into for Blake’s

five,

then thirteen, and finally into fourteen books), and for

Keats’ second Hyperion

poem. Strewn with epiphanic moments, Books XI and XII are the apt model for these poems, each of which is about the epiphanic moment. And in numerous literary imaginings of the eighteenth century these last books of Paradise Lost achieved a sharp focusing early on, in libretti of the same century by both Benjamin Stillingfleet and Richard Jago, in John Wesley’s evangelizing of Paradise Lost, and in a plethora of illustrations that accrued to these books: of Michael (or sometimes prevenient grace) descending and Adam and Eve leaving Paradise; of their envisioning the lazar house and cruel tournament, the sons of God and daughters of men, contention among the animals and murder among men, Jubal and Tubal Cain, Moses and the tablets, the dove, the rainbow, the covenant; of their hearing

about the annunciation of Christ’s birth and crucifixion.

shown

Adam may

sitting in sleep

his intercession

and

be awake and Eve sleeping, but she

— conscious of what she dreams,

even

is

if

was Milton’s illustrators, especially William Blake and Henry Fuseli, who by the end of the eighteenth century were placing the emphasis on Milton’s “uncommon and

sleeping. Indeed,

it

heterodox opinions,” 65 particularly

ment

in the last

as they

come out of conceal-

books of Milton’s poem.

M The Examiner 749 (2 June 1822), 340. h5 William Seward (quoting Mr. Echard) ,

505.

in

Biographiana (London, 1799),

p.

Feminist Milton

[ii6]

own

commitments, which are the commitments of new historicism in certain of its American versions, devalue the moment of prophetic illumination and bias him against a poetry of subversion that would scuttle the very orthoFish’s

ideological

some new historicists espouse. not that Books XI and XII, historically

doxies that Fish and, with him,

The important matter

is

devalued, should not be valued today, but that

if

once devalued

books may carry an ideological load that causes interpreters to reject on aesthetic grounds what for ideological reasons they are dismissing. What is not often enough perceived is that dismissive aesthetic judgments, or just disinterested inquiries, oftentimes and of Milton’s last books most times amount to ideological censorings. Blake understood something of this when in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he converted earlier aesthetic objections to these books into an ideological critique of Paradise these

—

—

Lost.

Emblazoned in the very name of the new historicism, under the aegis of which Fish writes his article, is the fact that sometimes the new historicism is an inscription of what it most deplores: New Criticism and Old History. Not really examining the past or past criticism, and hence innocent of both

its

ideological

diversity and divisions and of the complicated and conflicting

ways a

that present criticisms relate to

poem’s receptions and ensures,

that “the old historicism with

way tice”

dialectics’’ will 66

— and

that

its

as

it,

Fish erases the vestiges of

Marjorie Levinson insinuates,

providential coherences and one

be installed “at the very heart of our prac-

New

Criticism will

be

still

stomach.

its

It

is

not enough to query Milton’s political postures and manifestations

of them

in his writings;

we must

also

examine the various

receptions of those writings and the political postures instinct in

those receptions. Reminding us that Leavis text that

Lewis would revive

ticed as well that Leavis lectic,

one

deliver the

that dismantles the past

“Marjorie Levinson, University of California

its

“New

criticism that

and

in their critical dia-

many all

of

Historicism: What’s in a

— Los Angeles,

are

that, blurring the

concerns, and

16

November

the

might have no-

Fish

and Lewis together,

form of the

criticisms, blinds us to

at least in part,

would murder

now

writing:

content of

its

this revivifying

Name?”

1986).

(Lecture at

.

An

Alternative Perspective

[117)

Whatever the prevailing blindnesses of literary criticism, their most perilous form is evident in schools of criticism that, presuming to criticism but not necessarily the texts that are

provide

a critique

upon themselves.

of other

criticisms,

fail

its

object.

to reverse the critique

must

Criticism, as Levinson says so incisively,

not only critique the past but, reversing the dialectic, must yield itself to

“empty

a

critique

the past of

by the

past;

this

summons

and the present of

reality

its

evade

to

its

is

to

responsibil-

.” 67

ity

was not so much the looking for a story as the looking away from history, from politics and often from Milton’s sexual politics that caused readers to detour Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost, Milton’s female readers being the notable exception. Here the poem swerves on its axis from woman’s oppression to woman’s power and agency, and simultaneously swerves against the distorting perceptions of bourgeois ideology bent upon upholding rather than undermining the status quo. Books XI and It

—

—

XII clinch the arguments that Milton never endorses “the ugly voice of Adam that speaks

.

.

.

against the voice of poetry itself,”

harmony within the poem .” 68 Nor does Milton ever endorse the misogyny inscribed within the speeches of Satan in Paradise Regained, or of Samson and the Chorus in Samson Agonistes. To return to a modern femi“Eve and the poet

that

nist line

.

.

.

are in close secret

of criticism, when Christine Froula remarks that her conwith Milton’s views on

cern

is

lines

of force already inserted

less

retelling

makes

tion that she is

that

is

visible ,”

69

women

in the

she steers

and more with “the

Genesis story that Milton’s critical

herself reluctant to follow. In

discourse in a direcall

“welding of text and context” which,

Newton

explains, “requires a contest

which

poems there Judith Lowder

these as

— with ideology and with 7

the

dominant

last

poems

act

of exposing the patriarchal biases and the misogynistic

67

relations

reflect the

that ideology sustains.”

very attitudes they would

alter,

"

Milton’s

and

in the atti-

Ibid.

“Stevie Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1986), pp. 184, 191.

“Christine Froula, 70

Judith

“When Eve Reads

Milton,”

Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and

British Fiction,

p. 326.

Subversion: Social Strategies

1778-1860 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia

Press, 1981), p. xx.

in

[

1 1

8

]

Feminist Milton

tudes already

embedded

in interpretations

not in the stories themselves, these

poems

of the

biblical stories if

liberate scriptural nar-

redeem them, from both patriarchy and misogyny. Milton writes what Scripture tells; he writes especially of what is ratives,

hidden deep

in the scriptural text.

What

has been said of Michel-

poems; they provide “a sublime commentary, or rather development to sense, of the mysteries of Holy Writ, in all their connexion and dependencies .” Unlike Paradise Lost Paradise Regained and Samson Agangelo’s frescoes pertains equally to Milton’s

last

71

,

onistes

have not

readership;

it is

elicited

much

as if these texts

attention

from Milton’s female

have been surrendered to the male

establishment, although they are no less ripe for a feminist retrieval.

71

See “Historical Drama,” Fraser’s Magazine, 25 (1832), 672.

Chapter 5

A

Confounding Text and Test Case

Critical discourse has tended to be texts

examines. Tagged with

its

more misogynistic than

the

a patriarchal interpretation,

canonical texts pass into the culture validated by what the Institution of Reading has understood.

The aim of

a

— Adrienne Munich

feminist criticism as of any revolutionary criti-

cism should be to subvert the dominant discourses, not to

make compromises with them.

Not confined

— K. K. Ruthven

to Paradise Lost, Milton’s feminist consciousness

same humane understanding, in both Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, where in a startling maneuver Milton excises Ms. Manoa from the scriptural tale in which she figures so prominently and so heroically and includes Mary in a scriptural story where she has no place at all. The juxtaposition of these poems, their placement together issues forth in similar intensity, with the

but in inverted sequence,

and

crucial to their interpretation

is

hence to exposing the implications of the supposed misogynistic bias

of the

latter

of them.

It

is

not that there are no brazenly

misogynistic, patriarchal speeches in Samson Agonistes.

phase of human consciousness

there, calculatedly, to

mark

though

much with

it

is still

too

a

They

would advance upon, and they

us, Jesus

are

are

that,

and Paradise Regained

always accompanied by coun-

x

tercurrents of female affirmation. Patriarchy and misogyny, Mil-

ton seems to be saying, belong to the Satan of Paradise Regained

and to the world under the Old Dispensation, not the New; they [ii9]

[

Feminist Milton

20]

1

represent a stage in

human

history that Jesus, and Milton with

him, would silence as an oracle. Like Jesus, apparently, Milton would revise the value system

of

his

own

time by reversing

Milton would imbue

his texts

it.

Like the writers of Scripture,

with

horizon larger than that of

a

hoping through it to effect a transformation of their world-view. Again like the writers of certain scriptural texts, he

his readers,

would

exalt

towards

its

women who

promise, even

set history in if that

nudging it assumptions and temper its archal culture or

ence to be observed:

if

motion, moving

means standing up

to the side in order to

And

biases.

yet there

undermine

is

poem becomes

his

a

this

paradox

in

its

also a differ-

“women

the Bible yields the paradox that

Milton explodes

plot

against patri-

often play crucial roles but are rarely major characters ,’’ in Paradise Lost

its

such

1

at least

way

a

own

prophetic critique not only of its

that

culture

but also of itself. Ideologically rigorous, that critique exposes the contradictions

within historical Christianity instead of eliminating them. tensifies those contradictions in

make

to

clear that

such

a

Milton understands

way and with

women

to

It

in-

such force

have

as

a place in

and to be exalted by early Christianity in ways that male-sponsored versions of this religion often diminish and sometimes flatly deny. Because it so complicates this proposition and affords so

much

conflicting evidence, the test case for such a hypothesis

Samson Agonistes, about which the most enlightened of critics continue to say, “Milton’s conservative views animate Samson

is

Agonistes

,

a

work

nating

women

sensual

man .”

J.

angry denunciation of domi-

that includes an

and an unrelenting dramatization of an enslaved

2

Cheryl Exum, ‘“Mother

in Israel’:

A

Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty ster Press, 1985), p. 85. Peter

Familiar Figure Reconsidered,” in

M.

Russell (Philadelphia:

Westmin-

Bayle understood something of this, for his Diction-

ary (1697) contains the following statement: ‘‘Milton has written

two Poems

in

blank verse; one upon the temptation of Eve; the other upon the temptation of Jesus Christ” (see Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. John T. Shawcross [London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], p. 116). Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 36 (see also p. 25). But cf. Dayton Haskin, “Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word,” in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia Walker (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987), forthcoming.

A Confounding

Text and

Case

Pest

[121]

Joseph Wicksteed’s law that “works of inspiration are always being annexed by orthodoxy, which hardens itself against every

new

incursion of the spirit,”' finds extraordinary illustration

of Samson Agonistes and of its co-text, the Book of Judges. However far Milton may have strayed from platitudinous Christianity in his prose writings and epics, in Sam-

in the critical history

son Agonistes he a

chorus and

a

is

protagonist

women. The twin poem,

orthodoxy through

said to strain for a return to

who

concert issue a savage attack on

in

consciousness informing Milton’s dramatic

as well as the

Judges narrative, is obliterated in interpretation that views each work as confirming opinions that each challenges, using uncertainty, agitation, and conflict to

ancient prejudices

subversive thrust of both texts icism that reads each of

questions

Or

deflected, then denied,

casuistry,

to

for striking while the iron

by

a crit-

than

rather

raising

them with improved, even

represented as

is

often the

echoing traditional answers,

as

of these

else the subversive thrust

when acknowledged,

—

them

anew and responding

spired, solutions.

tion

is

well-known moral

elaborating

Too

lingering as cultural biases.

still

sweep away

is

a

simple

call for

in-

texts,

revolu-

down

hot and bringing

the

house upon the enemy’s head.

So Milton’s poem was read from the very beginning, and the Judges narrative was also read with Phillis Wheatley, for example,

using the

Samson

story to figure the plight as well as the

prospect for liberation of black people: “Give cess to the treasures .

.

.

[their]

man would

own

forded by

spirit

—

[their] .

.

.

.

is

bow

himself upon the

would have made him grind

at their mill !”

5

.

and the white

also the further

Thomas Babington Macaulay:

shall

.

acquainted with

[them] as vainly as the Philistines

Samson .” There 4

[them] free ac-

.

Make [them] own strength

ant shall find a guide to put his hand

once he

.

of knowledge.

strive to bind

strove against

.

example

af-

“If once the eyeless Gi-

on the props of

pillars,

woe

to

all

State

those

their laughing-stock, or chained

Yet Milton’s reading of

this story,

—

who

him no

if

to

less

Joseph Wicksteed, Blake’s Innocence and Experience: A Study of the Songs and Manuscripts (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928), p. 163. 'Memoirs and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1838), p. 9. 5 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “The Present Administration,” in British Radicals and Reformers, 1798-1832, ed. Wilfried Keutsch (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971), p. 109.

[

Feminist Milton

122]

attentive to

He

cated.

its

of

altogether

is

more

sophisti-

deploys the Samson story not to lock history in

but to7 propel

Samson

subversive elements,

forward, not to purvey Renaissance cliches about

it

good husband and Delilah

as a

a vise

as a

bad wife, “the worst

possible wives,” but to submit both these characters to in-

all

terrogation

6 .

Milton

may

well have understood the implications

sourcebook and have wished to draw them out, namely that “the judge Samson learned nothing from his near fatal Gaza episode, but nearly destroyed Israel as a result of the Delilah afof

his

fair .”

Samson Agonistes, then,

is a

superb example of that “dra-

poem by Kenneth Burke* what otherwise he may have had to ex-

matic subterfuge” attributed to the

whereby Milton includes clude from a poem that does not opt

for easy answers but tests,

problematizes, them. It

was understood by the

supposedly

and

“classical,

early nineteenth century that Milton’s established ”

and sedition” and urged, with nistes,

that

we

works harbor “blasphemy

specific reference to

Samson Ago-

should not object to “some noble touches of na-

magnanimity in the offspring of the first born of Adam. Milton allows something of this sort even to lovely Dalilah, although a Philistine; and all hearts acknowledge it .” 9 Owing to Samson Agonistes, it seems, women especially used the figure of Samson to illustrate the debasement of their male counterparts ture and .

.

.

who

have become “weak,

like

shaven Sampson,

Thine Eyes are out, thy Understanding Philistian Passions

And remembering

6

Mary

alone”:

blind,

triumph o’re the Mind.

that, after the Fall,

operate in the world,

left

women

Satan was given free rein to

thought that

this

unconfined

spirit

Weinkauf, “Dalila: The Worst of All Possible Wives,” 1500-1900, 13 (1973), 135; but cf. Heather Asals, “In Defense of Dalila: Samson Agonistes and the Reformation Theology of the Word,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 74 (1975), 183-94, and Joyce Colony, “An Argument for Milton’s Dalila,” Yale Review, 66 (1977), 562-75. 7 Robert C. Boling, The Anchor Bible: Judges (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, See, e.g.,

S.

Studies in English Literature,

1975 ),

p. 252.

"Kenneth Burke, “A Grammar of Motives ” and “A Rhetoric of Motives" (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962), p. 529. 'The Examiner, 779 (29

December

1822), 821.

A Confounding Text was

and Test Case

23

1 1

]

up again and then to be found inhabiting one of the saints, " perhaps even Saint Samson. Interpretive turpitude has produced a criticism that makes of Dalila simply an image of sexual mendacity, and of Samson simply a hgure tor heroic passivity culminating in virtuous action. likely to rise 1

Milton’s

last

poems

are “functional devices

viduals to question their

shape to

own

.

.

enabling] indi-

.

conduct, to watch over and give

To

and to shape themselves as ethical subjects.” the words of Michel Foucault, they are “etho-poetic” and

as

are concerned with self-decipherment and self-rule, with

moder-

it,

ating desire so that

does not erupt in violence. The

it

use

such

lives

of

every man, and especially the lives of heroes, are revealed in spir-

wherein

itual conflicts, agents,

whole drama of the olence of

through

men

at

killing

its

according to Foucault, “a

11

The

of episodes

life

of Samson, however,

— the slaying of

a lion,

is

figured

then of thirty

Ashkelon, the burning of three hundred foxes, then the

of a thousand

the slaying of

is

men

more than

which Samson’s stance

see,

soul struggling with itself and against the vi-

desires.”

a series

we

with the jawbone of an in all his life

he had

ass,

and

finally

slain before

—

in

desire for violence intensifies and in each in-

Samson

gratified. In the

story, episodes that

would

ordi-

narily be rehearsals for the eventual practice of virtue run counter to the

themes of

over the

self,

rule

of

self

over

self,

of the victory of oneself

so often attributed to this story. Instead, these epi-

sodes together drive the themes of self-enslavement, self-defeat,

and self-destruction, with Samson’s lost heroism finding its correlative. in the feminization of this hero. And this is the perfect See Jane Adams, “On Fortitude,” in Miscellany Poems (Glasgow, 1734), p. 79, and Mary O’Brien, The Pious Incendiaries; or, Fanaticism Display’d. A Poem ,0

(London, 1785), PP- 57 ff"Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 13, 88. In another observation, Foucault hits upon the ironic implications in Milton’s title, “Samson Agonistes “The metaphor of the match, of athletic competition and battle, did not serve

merely to designate the nature of the relationship one had with desires and pleasures, with their force that was always liable to turn seditious or rebellious; it also related to the preparation that enabled one to withstand such a confrontation” (ibid., p. 72). In a series of episodes, marked by the intensification of violence and increased gratification through revenge, Samson loses, instead of gains, control over himself and, increasingly tyrannizing himself, eventually becomes the captive of others, the slave of an enemy who is as much self as other.

Feminist Milton

[124]

story through

which

to assert the principle that relations

between

men and women usually have their political aspect. Like so many of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries, men and women alike, Milton understood and repeatedly proclaimed that the biblical stories

as

they are being interpreted must

“GOD’S

be squared with the laws of charity: as the pattern

of ours,” says Mary

ton said the same plicate,

12 .

He

also

charity

is

propos’d

and years before, Mil-

Astell;

comprehended

that to deepen,

com-

or even ambiguate the character of Dalila was not to

excuse her treachery but to compromise,

if

not undo, Samson’s

heroism. Indeed, as Milton scanned the Samson story he must

have confronted the same problems Astell to

have resolved them

It

can never be lawful

gencies, or

although he seems

less casuistically:

at

any Time, or

upon any Occasion,

pressly Forbid; unless

did,

He

to

in

do

any Circumstances or Exi-

which

that

shou’d expressly

GOD

Command

revocation of the former Precept; and which seems to

it,

has ex-

which

me

is

a

to be the

case of the Israelites in spoiling the Egyptians, and of Phineas, Ehud,

Samspon, and other Zealots under the Law, rant for

No less

what they did beyond the

Deborah does not

Samson, but

finally surpass

also, unlike Astell,

the beginning whether

within, by divine

Mary

stated Rule

had express war-

and

Law

13 .

than Astell, Milton must have wondered whether

acter like

12

who

char-

men

as

he seems to have wondered from

Samson

command

such mighty

a

is

compelled from without or

or private motive, and whether

at

The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London, 1705), p. 239. On Milton’s views, see Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting “ Samson Agonistes” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 307-22. Astell,

,

"Astell, 77ie Christian Religion, p. 213; see also p. 354. For Milton’s views, see

Wittreich, Interpreting “ Samson Agonistes ,” pp. 351, 358, 360, 379. The tendency (it knows no sexual boundaries) to slide by the contradictions in the Samson

much with

Adin

example, locates the obvious problems in this story: “The judges ... Fit a certain pattern of historic significance. The one exception is Samson. He does not readily fit into any category of heroes in Israel,” or again, “He not only failed to be a holy prophet but did not even fit the pattern of judge.” The tendency, here and elsewhere, is to obscure the mass of contradictions that envelop the character of Samson by fixing attention, instead, to Samson’s supposed “hidden potential”; see Steinsaltz, Biblical Images: Men and Women of the Book, trans. Yehuda Hanegbi and Yehudit Keshet (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 108, 109, 110.

story

is still

too

us.

Steinsaltz, for

.

.

.

A Confounding

Text and Test Case

the pillars he actually prays or simply resolves the in a

way

[125]

whole matter

that satisfies his thirst for revenge. Also unlike Astell,

Milton seems to have believed that God never suspends the law of charity, that God cannot be a contradiction of God’s own deity.

probably more than coincidence that the first explicit criticism of Samson Agonistes represents Milton as returning to the It is

folds

of orthodoxy,

as

evidenced by his orchestrating

incidents

all

and narrations around the deception by Dalila and the death of Samson. “Milton wrote too little in Verse, and too much in Prose, to carry the name of Best [English poet],” says John Dunton. But Dunton allows that it is a poem like Samson Agonistes

,

fashioned against

women

and fashioned for the ortho-

name to enter such competition in the be a poem like Samson Agonistes that

dox, that enables Milton’s first

place.

may

It

also

causes Dunton,

now

“

think of the Salvation of Cain, Eli,

What

are

we

to

Uzzah ....?” and

with reference to the

to conclude that in this

tional.

While there

whom

died in an act of

charge of his Duty,

Act of Justice on less arresting

owing

is

no ground of hope sin,

in the

his

own

list

.

.

.

Sampson,

Samson

is

excep-

for the others, each

Samson “died

of

gloriously, in the dis-

defence of his Country in executing an ,

and Gods Enemies.”' 4 This answer

than the question provoking

to reinterpretations

poem must have

biblical stories, to ask,

it,

which

itself

may

is

be

of the Samson story that Milton’s

promote and

already begun to

that

Dunton

would muzzle. In i/>73,

Richard Allestree cited the Samson story

as an illustra-

women’s “very powerful Influence upon all sorts of Transactions in the World” and mentioned Delilah as an example

tion of

of “the surest way to undermine the Councils, and master the force of the Stoutest Samson.”'"

By

1691, the year of Dunton’s

on both Samson Agonistes and the Book ofJudges, William Walsh, writing under the pseudonym “Eugenia,” wonders why “the same Book that condemns Dalilah, cries up Deborah reflections

,

and Jael

” .

He

said:

“For Dalilah

I

shall say nothing, out

to the Scripture, that represents her as an does say 14

Woman. ” But Walsh

something, and what he says speaks volumes:

See John Dunton’s The Athenian Gazette

London,

111

of respect

1691), pt.

1,

no. 25; pt.

5,

;

or.

Casuistical

Mercury

no. 14.

'"Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford, 1673), Preface.

(2

vols.;

[

1

2

Feminist Milton

5]

(

were she alive, she might tell you in her own defence, that what account you have of her, is from her profest Enemies: That however taking the thing as they tell it; if she did commit a piece of treachery, it was against an Enemy of her Country; and that it is very hard she should be so much run down for the same she would perhaps push her thing they have so admired in Jael ’Tis possible,

.

defence further, and Philistines to

his head,

This

is

tell

.

.

;

you, that tho she deliver’d Samson to the

be kept Prisoner, yet she neither drove

nor cut

it

off

a

Nail through

.

just the defense that Milton puts into the

giving her

a

16

role that

is

less restrictive

mouth of Dalila,

and stereotypical than

sometimes supposed, while simultaneously continuing the Renaissance tradition of dramatic representation of Delilah as a dynamic character a showstopper. In Samson Agonistes, Dalila’s betrayal of Samson is motivated by a desire “to save / Her countrey from a fierce destroyer,” and her offense seems less than that of “Jael, who with inhospitable guile / Smote Sisera sleeping through the Temples nail’d” (984-

—

85,

989-90).

“may

Among

“the Circumcis’d,” Dalila admits, her

name

With malediction mention’d / But in my countrey ... I I shall be nam’d among the famousest / Of Women” (975-83). Whatever Milton may say to the contrary in

De

stand deform’d,

/

.

.

.

Doctrina Christiana (VI. 763-64), in Samson Agonistes he for-

mulates the Jael-Dalila equation usually founded upon the that the

one traps

Sisera, the other

Samson, “by

faire

fact

and alluring

words” and then, in allowing the question to tumble forth of “whether lael did well or no, in thus deceiuing him,” registers, through the words of Dalila, the opinion of those who judged Jael’s murder of Sisera to be an act of “barbarous cruelty & William Walsh, A Dialogue Concerning Women Being a Defence of the Sex (London, 1691), pp. 80-81. Cf. Exum, ‘“Mother in Israel,’” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, p. 84: “A review of the Book of Judges reveals Deborah as one of the few unsullied leaders. She is followed by a series of male judges who display unexpected wickednesses and serious faults (Gideon, Jephthah, Samson).” Or as Davies reminds us, Milton “named his third and apparently favourite daughter after one of the great warrior women of the Old Testament, Deborah, the judge, poet, prophet and deliverer of Israel” ( The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton [Lexington: Univ. Press of Ken''

,

tucky, 1986],

p.

185).

A Confounding trechery.”'

Text and Test Case

[i

27]

comparison, moreover, Dalila seems more

In this

Samson inasmuch as she acts, as he does, against her own and her people’s enemy and not simply, as does Jael, against a supposed enemy of God. Even where a pernicious casuistry is employed to excuse Jael’s murderous act, there is the warning that “we have in no wise, liberty to follow [her) example” the same warning that from Martin Luther onward was typically attached to the Samson story and that caused some like du Bartas to diminish Samson by contrasting him with the “pru-

equatable with

—

dent Debora.” 18

From beginning

to end, the

Book of Judges

with images of the fragmented body.

It

is

shot through

begins with the Israelites

thumbs and toes of their enemies and ends with dismemberment of a concubine. Similar images run through Samson story and are sharply focused in Samson Agonistes

cutting off the the

the

when

Milton’s protagonist threatens “to tear [Dalila] joint by

joint” (953).

It is

in

such an image, repeated into

both works reveal themselves not

a leitmotif, that

condoning but condemning, to use the words of Jacques Lacan, “the preeminence of aggressivity in our civilization,” which “is usually confused in ‘normal’ morality,” especially as

of strength.” What son,

we

uses the

it

as

Samson

story, “with the virtue

actually witness in the character of

what Milton foregrounds

Sam-

of him,

in his representation

is

(again to apply a Lacanian observation) aggression effecting indi-

vidual destruction: “aggressivity integrates, a

it

castrates;

page of shame

is

it

gnaws away, undermines,

leads to death.

marries Dalila, as that the shame

head

,7

era to his

—

in her lap, snips

A

Woman

Commentary upon

were

Day of the

II

Week”

Saluste Sieur du Bartas,

1979),

II,

that

(or forgotten or

of Timna, he

now

when Dalila, (in the Book of

locks

a

the

pious fraud rather than by falsehood

a difference!” (VI. 764).

'“Rogers, pp. 221-22. See also III

life

much

magnified

away Samson’s

221-22. In De death, according to Junius, “by

as if there

now

is

not so

dis-

Whole Booke ofJudges (London, Doctrina Christiana, Milton writes that Jael entices Sis-

See Richard Rogers,

1615), pp.

It is

removed from Samson’s

undone) when, having married the his

” 19

du

Bartas,

“The Captaines: The

IIII

Part of the

The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de ed. Susan Snyder (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, (

1

.

781), in

610.

''Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:

W. Norton,

A

Selection, trans.

1977), pp. 10, 25.

Alan Sherilan

(New York: W. and

[ 1

Feminist Milton

28]

Samson

Judges,

shorn by the Philistines)

is

tells us, is “self-kill’d,”

even

not so

is

if

“not willingly” (1664-65).

much

a call for

scanning what Margot Heinemann would

venge.” 20 “

It

is

poem

a

humanitas ,” readying

kind.

“Where

else

humankind

does

‘care’ .

.

vengeance call “a

as a

poem

fantasy of re-

not of programmatic inhumanity but of to be concerned about

.

human-

tend but in the direction of bringing

? What man back to his essence become human but that man .

symbolic castra-

Samson’s self-destruction. Samson, Milton

tion that points to

Samson Agonistes

in a

.

.

.

else .

.

?

does that in turn betoken

Thus humanitas

really

does

remain the concern of such thinking,” says the philosopher, “for that man be human humanism: meditating and caring ‘inhuman,’ that is outside his essence.” and not inhumane The citation from Derrida here is exactly right. Better than any this is

.

.

.

.

(as

opposed

.

,

of Milton’s deconstructionist Milton’s

.

he explains the nature of

critics,

to his critics’) deconstruction

of the Samson

‘false exits’ ”

by attempting exit without ever changing terrain, thereby “repeating what is implicit in the founding concepts and the original problematic,

story.

[and]

They

.

using against the edifice the instruments or stones

.

.

turn “transgressions into

available in the house,” or they try to change terrain

ing absolute break and difference,

and

strictly

.

.

.

inhabiting

“by affirm-

more

naively

than ever the inside one declares one has deserted.” 21

Whatever their tactics, they produce one text, whereas Milton, by weaving into his texts various strategies of deconstruction, and always sensitive to

its

ideology, approximates the Derridean goal

of producing several texts

at

once.

orthodoxy of Milton’s interpretation of the Samson story, and then of his representation of women, rest on the veracity credited to Samson and the Chorus, Milton’s supposed spokespersons in Samson Agonistes. Samson’s “specious Monster accomplisht snare” (230) is the Chorus’ “fallacious All claims for the

.

Bride,

/

“

(537),

.

.

Unclean, unchaste” (320-21); his “deceitful Concubine” Hyerna ” (748), and “sorceress” (819) is their “manifest

Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and the Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), 2,J

p. 245. 2,

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 129, 135. Derrida is representing Heidegger on p. 129.

•

a

A Confounding Text and Serpent by her sting

Discover’d

/

particularized attacks

on “d

my

(202,

faithless

enemy”

379-80;

Woman”

my

[129]

end” (997-98). Samson’s

in the

deceitful

Test Case

— woman, — are pluralized by “

/

.

.

.

italics)

on “bad Women” (21 1) generally, or women generally bad. Samson’s focused rage modulates into their misogyny, their indictment of the entire female sex:

Chorus

the

into frontal assaults

outward ornament on thir Sex, that inward

for that such

Is it

Was

lavish’t

Were

left

for hast unfinish’t,

Capacity not

Or

rais’d to

value what

is

judgment

best

[written]

more

sex” than these verses, Robert Southey

dor

in

.

.

most excellent

bitter against the tells

female

Walter Savage Lan-

known

is

to

we “learn virtue and piety by the example of woman” (VII, 489) and to have poeticized this

claim years before in

ways

wrong? (1025-30)

an imaginary conversation, 22 but then Milton

have proposed that .

scant,

apprehend

In choice, but oftest to affect the

“Never was anything

gifts

A

Masque. Moreover, as

insisted that an author

is

a

poet Milton

to be distinguished

from

al-

his char-

and by the end of the eighteenth century his interpreters would insist on observing the same distinction, so that even those like John Aikin, who allowed to Thomas Newton that Milton “holds extremely high the authority of a husband and represents acters,

the female sex as objects of caution,”

must acknowledge:

“It

has

been invidiously suggested, that Milton chose the story of Sams.on for the

opportunity

it

gave him of

satirizing

bad wives.

I

should rather imagine, that the assertion of pure religion, and the resistance of tyrannical power,

which gave him Aikin in

first

were the chief circumstances

a predilection for this fable.”

published

response to the

“An Essay on

critical

2

'

By

1808,

when

the Poetry of Milton,” largely

posture assumed by Milton’s female

readership, the crucial question for criticism

was whether Mil-

“See The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970), p. 334. 23 As reprinted by Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin (Philadelphia, 1824), p. 194. John Aikin’s essay was first published in the initial volume of The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton (4 vols.; London, 1808). ,

[

1

Feminist Milton

30]

mind was bound

unbound from, social conventions and prejudices, the supposition on the part of Milton’s male and female, readers alike being that the mind exhibiting itself in the last poems “knows no limits but those impassable by the human intellect,” that such “a great mind cannot without injurious conton’s

to,

or

shrink itself to the grasp of common passive readers,” be-

straint,

communicates by “splendid confusion.” 24 Samson Agonistes would seem to supply all the ammunition needed for a modern feminist attack on Milton. Yet this text that cause

is

it

historically so

important to the feminist enterprise

being scanted by Rogers,

who

Lost but even

phasis

it,

with the possible exception of Katharine

assumes that Samson Agonistes no

more obviously,

is

than Paradise

less

,

... on

currently

is

written “with unnecessary

em-

the wife’s inferiority and subjection to her hus-

band” and with “the same views” registered in Paradise Lost now being given definitive formulation “by the Chorus which, like most dramatic choruses, expresses the ‘right’ point of view in .

.

.

,

the play.” 25

one woman of the eighteenth century found in Samson Agonistes a “moral” play that even if it precludes “theatrical exhibition” is a fine tragedy. 26 And most female readers of Milton in the same century (and in this they are different from Milton’s male readership) insisted upon separating the Historically,

at

least

dance from the dancer, Milton’s views from those expressed by Samson and the Chorus. That is, Milton’s female readership, in touch with the essentials of Greek tragedy, must have realized that choral

gation,

is

commentary,

itself

especially

when

it

functions as interro-

being interrogated; that the gradual atrophying of

the chorus in tragedy involves the tive element; that tragedy

abandonment of this interroga-

and history were, early on, irrevocably

involved with one another, the flowering of the one genre corre-

sponding with the birth of the other. Resurrecting tragedy, Milton does, signals a historical conception and commitment

as in

-4

Sec Lucy Aikin, Memoir ofJohn Aihin, and W. E. Charming, Remarks on the Character and Writings ofJohn Milton, 2nd ed. (London, 1828), p. 17. ’’Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: ature (Seattle:

A

History of Misogyny

Univ. of Washington Press, 1966), pp.

146-47, 1 57 26 See “Preface to the Tragedies,”

1

5

1

,

in Liter-

156; see also pp. ix,

-

don, 1830),

II,

150.

in

The Works of Hannah More

(11 vols.;

Lon-

A Confounding Text and

Case

Test

[13 1]

Samson Agonistes reconstituting the chorus, centering it in his play, amounts to a restoration of the interrogative element, and doing this while foregrounding the agon of tragedy within his ti;

but

tle is

a

Miltonic reminder that in drama the agon functions,

in

words of Roland Barthes, “to mediate conflicts without censoring them” and to afford through these conflicting attitudes “a the

complete representation of religious and values.” 2

aesthetic

much

Yet unlike

like Christian tragedians,

tragedians,

classical

Milton

way Milton

but

very

not indifferent in his

is

representation of competing systems, but instead choice. In this

moral and

historical,

would

foster a

forces his culture into dialogue with

it-

with the intention of undermining, not underpinning, the accepted values and beliefs of his own civilization. Like the Bible, self,

Milton’s poetry turns this dialogue with culture into

a critique

of

that culture.

Samson Agonistes

dependency instance the pretation. political

it

unique

is

establishes

among

between

Book ofJudges,

Milton’s itself

Presumably Milton holds

to a

story and his special plotting of it within

upon

illusion but

and Scripture,

what

that

is,

is

in this

and guide to intervision of history and a

ends

his choice

of the Samson

dramatic mode,

a

story

in disillusionment, a story

from

a

the past that addresses Milton’s present as if to say, ent,

for the inter-

as a condition for

philosophy that determine both

that feeds

poems

our concern. In

a

poem

it is

that has

the pres-

no narrator

embedded narrative perspective scrutinized by the Chorus, whose own perspective is scrutinized. The Chorus utters the commonplaces that in this poem come under there

is

nevertheless an

challenge;

it

opens

rifts

and creates

fissures in a text, the tears

and

ruptures of which are guides, not obstacles, to interpretation.

Samson Agonistes

is

not only

a

tragedy forged from scriptural

history, but also a tragedy using past history to glimpse at present

history and using, as Barthes might say, old mythological an-

swers to formulate

new

questions: “to interrogate

mythology

is

what had been in its time a fulfilled answer” out of another time, emerge unsettling questions. 28 It is this

to interrogate

which, 27

in

Roland Barthes, The

Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and

Representation, trans. Richard

75

-

2H

Ibid., p. 68.

Howard (New York:

Hill

and Wang, 1985),

p.

Feminist Milton

[132]

interrogative element in Samson Agonistes

Book of Judges,

that interpreters

,

no

less

than in the

have sought to repress, forget-

ting that both texts are at once history and

prophecy but

not for-

which thrusts Milton’s poem into the world of politics and makes of it a meditation on the history of his own times. The Judges tragedy, John March declares, is “this days Tragedy” in both its private and public aspects, for in this tragedy, which in Milton’s hands becomes “the fifth act of ” 2V we behold our the tragedy of Samson’s successive failures, own deformities, and in them the deformities of our age. Both getting that

it

is

the biblical text

texts are accounts

through times past of time-present, “terror-

3" striking looking-glasse[s],” mirrors of magistrates and tyrants,

which the two blur so insistently that Samson seems now a hero, now a villain, and so that here Dalila seems a treacherous lady, and there a deeply wronged wife. One of the more curious features involving the breakdown of the Samson typology in the seventeenth century is that, as the identity between Samson and Christ collapses, another between Delilah and Christ establishes itself in such a way that as Samson comes to seem more blamable Delilah appears less culpable. Thus Thomas Taylor can propose, “As Dalilah, when she knew wherein Samsons great strength lay,

in

did soone disarme him, so Christ spoyled Satan of his lockes.” 31

But then a is

this active

way of affirming

complication and blurring of characters

is

but

the Nietzschean proposition that in tragedy

it

not the character of the hero, his “luminous shape projected

onto

a

dark wall,” that matters so

much

as the act

of “penetrat-

ing] into the myth which is projected in these luminous reflections” where we come up against a phenomenon quite different

from our expectations, “the exact opposite of

a familiar optical

one.

March,

A

ofJanuary 1676-7 (London, 1677), p. 7; and Pauli Franklin Baum, “ Samson Agonistes Again,” Publications of the Modem Language Association, 36 (1921), 357. y john Vicars, A Looking-Glasse for Malignants\ or, Gods Hand Against God"'John

Sermon on

the 30th

(London, 1643), p. 2, and Samuel Torshel, A Design about Disposing the Bible into an Harmony (London, 1647), p. 27. 3l Thomas Taylor, Christs Combate and Conquest or, The Lion of the Tribe ofJudah (London, 1618), p. 36. haters

;

'’Friedrich Nietzsche, “T/ie Birth of Tragedy” and “ trans. Francis Golffing

(New York: Doubleday,

The Genealogy of Morals,”

1956), p. 59.

•

A Confounding Text

and Test Case

[133]

—

Samson’s wife a tradition that exists in order to validate second choices and to valorize Samson as a hero, but that, as deployed by Milton, neither exonerates Samson for his marriage choices nor exalts him to heroic proportion Milton departs from Scripture, but not from traditional hermeIn representing Dalila as

—

John Trapp may report

neutics. to

have been

her the

that “the

Rabbines make Delilah

.

[Samson’s] wife, and further say, that he taught

Law of

Moses before he took her,” 33 but through the

.

.

words of Manoa, John Milton suggests otherwise: praise thy Marriage choises, Son, .

.

thou didst plead

.

What

(420-24).

is a

matter of marrying

/

Divine impulsion

infidels,

.

in the

.

/

.

I

—

is

not that”

state

— the

Book of Judges

and such marriages

increasing debasement

Israelites’

Rather approv’d them not;

/

framing device

cannot

“I

as a sign

foregrounded

in

of the

Samson

by Milton’s centering of his drama in the story of Samson’s liaison with Dalila. This son of Dan (Dan himself was the Agonistes

son of

a

concubine) marries

a harlot,

who

is

then perceived as

a

serpent by both the Chorus and Samson, himself a serpent in the

way, the

a

viper in the path, and the

Book of Life

in the

last

son of a tribe canceled from

enumerations of the Apocalypse. Milton’s

Dalila does not confirm the heroism of

Samson but

doubt, in the process dispelling the notion that and

further,

poem

meant not

fell first,

to obfuscate history but to illu-

the marriage of Samson and Dalila

it,

in

fall.

creative distortion

minate

woman

it

by measuring the extent of man's decline against Sam-

son’s second

A

casts

because he makes of

it

is

crucial to Milton’s

moral problem, perhaps “want-

a

ling] to save the lady’s dignity, not the hero’s,”

suredly wanting to introduce

a

34

but

more

as-

moral quandary to the poem.

Through this marriage, Milton problematizes Samson’s character, making of Samson himself a riddle, but he also uses this marriage, as

attitudes

Christopher Hill well understands, to challenge reigning

toward

women

in his representation

of Dalila, which

provides an escape from seeing Dalila simply as

sogyny. “Once he had decided to use the Samson myth,

"John Trapp, Annotations upon 1662),

I,

the

Old and

New

mi-

a target for

how

Testaments (5 vols.; London,

90.

"William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961),

p.

224.

Feminist Milton

[134]

shown by

his

“He hardly chose

the

could he have avoided the hostility towards Dalila

who

sources,” asks Hill, story for this reason.

he possibly could. Bible did not give

.

.

.

then continues,

Milton gave Dalila the best arguments

—

He made her Samson’s wife a status the her.” And if Milton did not go far enough, he .

.

.

nevertheless follows through with the tendencies evident in Paradise Lost to

subvert

commonly

and male supremacy heroism, but

35 .

Dalila

times she

at

held ideas about female subjection

is

propriety of their marriage

a is

is

no longer

Samson’s

a foil for

mirror exposing his questioned, whether

failings. If the

was indeed

it

sanctioned by God, that questioning extends to other episodes,

most notably the temple disaster, where divine inspiration had also been claimed for Samson. Very simply, in his own representations

of Samson and

Dalila,

Milton

may

be understood, as

Charles Dunster urged long ago, “to have imagined Samson, in his

marriage with Dalila, acting merely from inclination, and

falsely attributing

and ascribing

it

to divine impulse .”

36

.

.

.

Within

the text of Samson Agonistes, there seems to be a counterstatement for every statement, are the seeds of

its

and

own

in

every interpretation proffered there

destruction.

Milton’s questioning of Samson’s motives

is

consistent with

judgments of the Chorus. There are those who believe that Milton’s Chorus is an idealized spectator, imbued with “vitalizing energy” and assuming “the role of a moral preceptor ,” 37 and there are those, far more typical, who view the choral speeches in Samson Agonistes as “highly platitudinous” and “wholly conventional,” with Milton’s point being that “the Chorus embodies ... a mentality universally found, and one all too common among Christians of his own day” 38 a mentality that Milton, having sloughed it off, the related strategy of questioning the sentiments and

—

35

See Christopher

Hill, Milton

and the English Revolution

(New York:

Viking,

1977), p. 443.

^Dunster’s note

is

printed by Egerton Brydges, in The Poetical Works ofJohn

Milton (London, 1862), 37

See, e.g.,

M.

V.

p.

494.

Rama Sarma,

Things Unattempted:

Delhi: Vikas, 1982), pp. 91, 93. 38 See, respectively, Lynn Veach Sadler, Consolation

A

Study of Milton

in “ Samson

(New

Agonistes ”: Re-

generation and 'Typology, Salzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg: Univ.

of Salzburg, 1979), dition

in

Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical TraShakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and Milton (Princeton: Princeton Univ. p. 72, also p.

150;

'

A Confounding would have others slough Samson’s viewpoint

is

a

Text and Test Case

[135]

off as well. Judging everything

from

frequent error in Milton criticism, but

endows his Chorus with “admirable truths and emotions” when the poet, as John Huntley remarks, seems little inclined to “put his own judgment into their mouths.” 39 Perhaps the gravest mistake made by Milton’s inter-

so

is

the supposition that Milton

preters has been to read Samson Agonistes as an autobiographical

poem, forgetting the Nietzschean wisdom that the dramatist can never become one with the images he contemplates, but is instead a figure of “serene, wide-eyed contemplation gazing upon its images.” " Ultimately, criticism should extend to Samson and the Chorus what Arnold Stein says of Manoa: they speak their mind, “such as it is”; they speak of what the Old Dispensation allows them to see. But Milton sees further and beyond; he sees in the Samson story history in miniature in the words of Richard Helgerson, history as “a series of betrayals” 42 with Samson being betrayed by women but also betraying them, as well as himself and God, and God, in turn, betraying Samson by withdrawing from both him and history. Milton’s poem is no easy Christianizing of the Samson story or gaudy moralizing of it; and more than just another rendering of 4

41

—

that story, the

poem

presents history at a crossroads

— history

happening, being lived through, and taking on meaning from those, fictive and real,

edy

Samson

in the

who move

story,

no

less

across

its

stage.

is

trag-

than in the Genesis story of the

of Adam and Eve, the only escape from which

fall

There

is

the Christian

¥

and Joan S. Bennett, “Liberty under the Law: The Chorus and the Meaning of Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies, 12 (1978), 141, 142. See also John Huntley, “A Revaluation of the Chorus’s Role in Milton’s Satnson Agonistes,” Modern Philology, 64 (1966), 132; Virginia R. Mollenkott, “Relativism in Samson Agonistes,” Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 92; and Kathleen M. Swaim, “The Doubling of the Chorus in Samson Agonistes ,” Milton Studies, 20 Press, 1981), p. 266;

(1984), 225-45. 39

“A Revaluation of

Huntley,

the Chorus’s Role in Milton’s Samson Ago-

nistes,” p. 138.

“’Nietzsche,

“

The

Birth of Tragedy” and “

The Genealogy of Morals,”

ed. Golf-

fing, p. 78.

^'Arnold

Stein,

ed. Galbraith 42

in

Twentieth-Century Interpretations of

Crump (Englewood

“ Samson

Agonistes ,”

Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 64.

Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983), p. 277.

.

Feminist Milton

[136]

drama of redemption and restoration. That drama makes Christian tragedy what it is, imparts to it its special inflection, but as J.

A. Bryant proposed, without ever canceling out the tragedy:

what remains of the divine im43 age within man’s [and woman’s] present fallen state.” Samson and Dalila are hinge figures, comparing and contrasting with what once was in the Garden both before and after the Fall and with what now is in Milton’s England, a land of tragedy that we must stand upon for the duration of Milton’s poem and from which we view the black cloud that threatened once, and has “Christian tragedy

.

.

discovers

.

threatened again, to annihilate history. In fine,

Samson Agonistes enters into

flective, relationship

a contentious,

not just re-

with canonized morals, institutionalized val-

ues and attitudes, especially those concerning the relationship

between the sexes, and in such a way as to present an account not just of woman’s but also of man’s insatiable lust. The Samson story, in Milton’s representation of it, is now like the Samson story in judges, which, as Mieke Bal remarks, is no “paradigm of woman’s wickedness” but rather a story in which a humanized Delilah “enters into conflict with the image of Samson as a hero” and helps to contravene that image. 44 Milton here mediates between the old and the new so that the attitudes of the Chorus are placed at odds with Milton’s own opinions; his values require a recision of their values. It is not only that Milton, in the course of a lifetime, changed his opinions; he believed that others should do the same. And opinions did change during the next century, in part probably because of the influence of Samson Agonistes and the sheer force of its interrogation. What before Milton had been read as a story of sharpening antitheses (of Christ and Antichrist, of heroes and fools) is after Milton read as a story in which it is difficult to determine whose folly and impudence is worse Samson’s or Dahla’s

— whose

“besotted and void of the

Book of Judges,

.

.

.

—

wickedness

is

who

at issue,

consideration.” 45

No

less

is

more

than that for

the critical history of Samson Agonistes

is

the

43

A. Bryant, Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1967), p. 1 1 3 J.

“Mieke 351 45

Bal,

“The Rhetoric of

Subjectivity,” Poetics Today,

5

(1984),

.

See the

anonymous

History of Samson (London, 1797), pp.

1

1-12.

347,

•

)

A Confounding history of

how

critical

perception

Text and first

is

Case

Test

1

1

7

3

blunted, then barba-

rized.

Flickerings of unorthodoxy, or of orthodoxy, are sometimes signs of a divided allegiance, of unconscious sympathies warring

with and being bridled by conscious intent. Sometimes, too, they are signals (and that

ton’s last

how would

is

take them, especially in Mil-

I

poems) of an encoded system of subversion.

how

propriate that criticism should concern itself with

Milton’s poetry, but

also sheer folly that

is

it

It

ap-

is

to read

should do so

it

without, or even only, taking account of how Milton was and read. If the question

dent today, there

How

of how Milton should be read seems impru-

is a

Milton’s poetry

— and

must ask of the

criticism

it

Why

is it

An tain

seem

further question that might

might Milton be read? Indeed, the very questions

does

situate

its

written

is

it

invites the asking it

critique?

has bred:

How

What would

it

—

less so:

we

ask of

we how

are questions

does

produce,

it

do with

that critique?

at all?

older feminist criticism must be credited with focusing cer-

preoccupations of Milton’s

as in its

dwelling on

how

first

readers,

and

in this (as well

Milton ought to be read) with provid-

ing us with an important and exhilarating turn of the lens. In that turn, the nature

and situated culminated

of Milton’s critique of culture

— comes into focus.

in a

“break through

.

If .

.

— how

it is

eighteenth-century criticism giv[ing] to every country in

world an adequate notion ... of Milton’s genius,” 46 breakthrough to which Milton’s female readership made the

contribution.

On

the other hand,

realized

much

it

was

a

major

a

recent feminist criticism

has surrendered such concerns and has consequently been re-

buked ord,

for privileging the historical guess over the historical rec-

most important ally in its equally important endeavor, so formulated by Annette Kolodny, of opening the “lens

its

finely

.

widest possible angle of vision.”

to

its

is

also likely to be

with

its

ideological

47

.

.

Recent feminist criticism

rebuked for confusing

its critical

obligations

commitments, which involve the

of certain texts and the relinquishing of others

— and

raising

in the case

William Seward, Biographiana (London, 1799), p. 505. Annette Kolodny, “Turning the Lens on ‘The Panther Captivity’:

up of

'“'See 47

nist Exercise in Practical Criticism,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 345.

A

Femi-

Feminist Milton

[138]

Milton, the relinquishing of the one text that

is

promoter and that is

itself a

of ideological and ideologically rigorous criticism therefore a potent ally in the feminist cause.

feminist criticism to reinterpret the canon as the canon. In the critique

it is

words of Adrienne Munich,

would question not only

important for

as

It is

for

it

to redress

“Ideally, a feminist

the inadequate representation of

other voices in the western literary canon but the inadequate explication of received tradition.”

This says

is

48

explicitly the undertaking

— feminist

and new

of

anthology of es-

would rewrite the misreading but through a more capa-

historicist

Renaissance not by creative

—

a recent

that

cious representation of Renaissance culture in the belief that in

omissions the humanist lens fosters distortions, perspective.”

“Too much

is left

out,

a

and too much

its

“skewing of is

at

stake”

is

argument of this collection. What has been left out what seems always to be left out are the female witnesses, their observations and achievements, and the findings of the overriding

—

—

social historians

who

overdue attention.

are

We

now

giving these female voices long

are apprised that

what

is

“at stake” in this

rewriting, revaluing, of the Renaissance “is the possibility of a fuller,

more

and of its

grounded understanding” of the period productions. 49 Yet when we turn to the two es-

historically

literary

says on Milton,

we

discover that the feminist enterprise, here

aligned with Stanley Fish and there with

new

historicism,

is

sometimes imperiled by both. Milton’s views on divorce are cited, even quoted, not from his own texts but from those texts as they are filtered

through recent criticism; that

as

is,

Milton

is

being

recontextualized his texts are decontextualized. Moreover, the

—

one female witness here enlisted by Richard Halpern Mrs. Attaway, whose reading of Milton’s divorce tracts caused her to leave her husband does not merit so much as a footnote. 50

—

Rather than countenancing the views of Mrs. Attaway, Halpern* ^Adrienne Munich, “Notorious Signs, Feminist Criticism and Literary Tradition,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 251. See the introduction by Margaret Ferguson, with Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers, to Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. xv, xvi. ’“See the essay by Richard Halpern, “Puritanism and Maenadism in A Masque ,” in ibid., pp. 93, 96. The polite precision with which male authorities ,

4SI

A Confounding Text

and Test Case

[139]

camouflages them, making us chase them down by tracking through an oddly inflected essay by Nathaniel Henry. Deriving his information from David Masson, Henry misses Masson’s

which (when deciphered) enables us to discover Mrs. Attaway in Thomas Edwards' own intricately and mis-paginated work, erroneously dated by both Halpern and Henry as crucial citation,

“

644 .”

i

It

is

51

evident that Halpern does not

Attaway

as

knows

he

it

is

heard

know

the voice of Mrs.

contemporary report by Edwards;

in

her voice only as reinflected in a twentieth-century

abridgment and transmission of

by Henry, upon whom considerable suspicion is cast by Milton’s recent variorum editors: “Henry’s argument seems unacceptable” to them, especially with reference to Mrs. Attaway, for it assumes that Milton did not know what he was doing, or changed his mind in midstream. 52 In Halpern’s account Mrs. Attaway’s words are uprooted from history and muffled; they are distanced, distorted, then discredited, even as the previously discredited voice of Henry is now credited and that of Milton’s adversary “shallow that report

—

Edwards'' the poet calls

him

in

privileged. Surely those

who

tell

ever their accuracy, have

On

the Forcers

of Conscience

—

is

us that Edwards’ reports, what-

a “hostile slant”

ever “eclectic,” was closer to the radicals

and that Milton, how-

whom

Edwards

attacks

than to Edwards himself are closer to the mark. 53

With Henry, who reproduces but

a part

of Masson’s argument,

with the exception of Milton, is not accorded to Mrs. Attaway, who here described as “a kind of seventeenth-century maenad” (p. 96). See Thomas Edwards, Gangraena; or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many are cited, sl

and Pernicious

is

of

of the Sectaries of This Time (London, 1646), and David Masson’s Life ofJohn Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (7 vols.; the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies,

Practices

New

York: Peter Smith, 1946), III, 189-92, along with Henry’s “Who Meant Licence When They Cried Liberty?” Modern Language Notes, 66 (1951), 509-13. The “1644” date apparently derives from Masson, The Life ofJohn Mil1881; rpt.

ton, III, 189,

but

is

Records ofJohn Milton

(New

May

Milton French, ed., The Life Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1949-58), II,

corrected to 26

1646 by

J.

H3-

Woodhouse and Douglas Bush, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: The Minor English Poems (New York: Columbia Univ. 52

A.

S.

P.

Press, 1972),

II,

396.

See Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 85, and also by Hill, Milton and the English 53

Revolution, pp. 99-100.

[

1

Feminist Milton

40]

Halpern predicates that Edwards’ opinion of Mrs. Attaway corresponds to Milton’s own opinion of her. According to Halpern, Milton, like Edwards, is attacking the great red dragons of Cole-

man

Street

and “the foolish extremists of his

own

faction” (espe-

Sonnets XI and XII), particularly the Mrs. Attaways and Mr. Jenneys, who seem to be asking for freedom with license, not liberty, and who, according to Henry, because they belong to cially in

a social

and economic

class different

from

that

of Milton and are

“apparently uneducated,” would necessarily be regarded by Mil-

ton as adversaries, not forgets,

who

rescripted

54

same Milton, Halpern the Judges story so that the vulgar might

allies

.

This

is

the

escape the temple holocaust. Writing under the banner of feminist criticism

and

in the harness

of

new

historicism, Halpern

is

concerned with what Edwards thought of Attaway, never with

what Edwards thought of Milton. When factored into his presentation, this concern renders suspect most of what Halpern, and Henry before him, conclude. Edwards’ attack is leveled first against “Milton’s doctrine of divorce,” which, misreading, he summarizes thus: ’Tis lawfull for a

man

away his wife upon indisposition, of minde arising from a cause in nature

to put

unfitnesse or contrariety

unchangeable; and from disproportion and deadnesse of

or

spirit,

unmutable bent of name; and man in regard of the freedome and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which something

distastefull

was made

for him, neither need he hear

himself.

and averse

in the

any judge therein above

55

According

Edwards, Milton’s radically subversive and patently offensive opinions are founded upon patriarchal doctrines and misogynistic conventions, and for later interpreters like Henry and Halpern, such claims become chief evidence for their supposition that Milton could never have accepted Mrs. Attaway M Henry,

to

“Who Meant

When They

Cried Liberty?” pp. 512, 513. Masson is similarly conscious of Mrs. Attaway’s not being of Milton’s class: “We must, I am sorry to say, descend lower in the society of London if we would understand how Milton’s Divorce opinion had begun to operate, and Licence

.

with what consequences of its operation his Life ofJohn Milton, 55

III,

189).

Ed wards, Gangraena,

pt. 1, p. 34.

name was

.

.

,

associated” (Masson, The

A Confounding Text as

and Test Case

(141)

an ally and so must have cast her into the role of adversary,

as

Edwards did. With Edwards, such interpreters suppose that, however outrageous his other beliefs, Milton thought it was an

women

error of the age to argue that the First Letter of Paul to

ever be claimed for

never

comming

Only

made

those in

Timothy, because the most

that can

is

that they are “ever learning,

knowledge of the

for

propounding ec-

anarchy and monstrous toleration, only

of Milton a

symbol

for the

and

truth.” 56

Edwards has reproved Milton

after

clesiastical

like

women

to the

should not be

after

he has

gangrene of modern

liberal

opinions, does he invoke the figure of Mrs. Attaway:

There are two Gentlemen of the Inns of Court, civill and well disposed men, who out of novelty went to hear the woman preacher, and after Mistris Attaway the lace-woman had finished her ex-

two Gentlemen had some discourse with her, and among other passages she spok to them of Miltons Doctrine of Divorce, and asked them what they thought of it, saying, it was a point to be considered of; and that she for her part would look more into it, for she had an unsanctified husband, that did not walk

ercise,

in the

these

way of Sion, nor

how acanother wom-

speak the language of Canaan-, and

cordingly she hath practiced

it

in

running away with

ans husband.

that when a Edwards tells of Mr. Jenney, who “held mans wife was not a meet help, he might put her away, and take

Later

.

.

.

Milton was put in a “no-win” situation by his contemporaries. For Edwards, Milton is now too much the patriarch and now not enough a misogynist. Another of Milton’s contemporaries, whose remarks are perhaps better known today than those by Edwards, objects, first, that divorce is an aspect of Jewish misogyny, a part of the Law that the New Testament transcends, and then, revealing the extent to which his own objections to Milton’s position are an aspect of Christian patriarchy, with its own thinly disguised misogyny, contends that solace and conversation are not, as Milton believes, an essential part of marriage. In support of his own argument and by way of discrediting Milton’s, this anonymous author invokes the authority of experience, “which shows, that man ordinarily exceeds woman in naturall gifts of minde, and in delectablen[e]sse of converse,” and thereupon the authority of Scripture, which Milton is said to trifle with and abuse: if solace and conversation were his concern, “then would it have been more pleasant and beneficiall to Adam to have had another mancreated, then a woman” (see An Answer to a Book Intituled, The Doctrine and Disci“Ibid., p. 31.

pline of Divorce

[London, 1644],

sig.

C2V C 3V ,

).

Feminist Milton

[142]

another; and

when

the

woman was

an unbeliever

.

.

.

she was not

meet help, and therefore Jenney left his wife, and went away with Mistris Attaway .” Edwards, that is, elides Attaway and Jenney with Milton, all of whom are accused of serving themselves, their own lusts, and “deceiving] the hearts of the simple. ” In this way Edwards etches an attitude toward Milton that will stalk the poet in later years. The toleration that Milton and his ilk propound, says Edwards, is but a “pretended liberty of conscience,” with Attaway and Jenney here exemplifying “wicked and ungodly marriages, leaving their own husbands and wives, and tak37 ing others to live with them” as “one Mfilton]” urges. Still, divorce, just a “pretence of casting off Antichristian horrible yokes,” is for Edwards but one of “the Sectaries uncleannesses” among which must also be numbered their antiTrinitarian and sometimes Arian sentiments, their justifications for rebellion, their notion that a new light, a new spirit, is emerging and advancing humankind to a greater perfection. In short,

a

.

Edwards

strikes

at

the millennial themes,

.

.

the very spirit of

prophecy, that inform most of Milton’s early prose

tracts,

thus

opposing the idea that people generally will be endowed with the spirit of prophecy, that a nation of visionaries will emerge, that there will be a general restoration will be a building

The hypothesis

— indeed,

that in this age there

up of Jerusalem. 58 that

Milton aligns himself with Edwards

der to attack Mrs. Attaway and Mr. Jenney (that fringe in his

own

party)

—

in light

— seems improbable,

Masson

in this case rests

the lunatic

of Edwards’ scattershot attack

on Milton himself ited to

is,

in or-

upon

and the authority cred-

a partial

account of what

Milton’s biographer actually said. Initially churlish, that account

ends in charity and

in

any event

is

less

remarkable for what

it

tells

Attaway than for the motives it ascribes to and the portrait it paints of Edwards. Milton is mentioned by Edwards “in order to implicate [him] in the subsequent break-down ... of the poor woman [Mrs. Attaway] morally,” but of Edwards’ maligning of this woman, Masson urges that “One should not judge of even a poor enthusiastic woman, dead two hundred years ago, us about

57

Ibid. ,

pt. 2,

pp. 10-11, 135, and pt.

4 ]. 58

Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 176, 178, 179.

3,

pp. 27(43], 295(311],

187-88 [203-

•

A Confounding on

that sole authority,” especially

Text and Test Case

when

her accuser

is

[143] a

“nau-

seous creature of the pious kind,” and thereupon concludes: that

Attaway knew Milton’s divorce tracts is to be trusted; that she misread and thus abused them is not necessarily to be credited. 59 If Masson and Halpern are taken as the representatives, respectively, of old and new historicism, their criticism becomes lodged in a paradox where complexity and nuance characterize the former and where flattening simplification is the hallmark of the latter;

and

in that

paradox many of the complaints broadly issued

against an old historicism in the

misguided, and

ill-founded,

name of a new

seem

historicism

With the examples

fictitious.

may even

forded by Masson and Halpern, there

af-

who

be those

wish that the new preceptors were more the old preceptors writ large.

As represented by

the essays

on Milton

in Rewriting the Renais-

between historicisms, old and new, involves not alteration and complication of perspective (as promised) but an alternative premise concerning Renaissance history, which opposes the humanists’ view of a harmonious world order with a vision of culture torn by dissension and ideological strife. Historicisms, old and new, thus provide different profiles of a culture, while often promoting the same easy relationships between literary texts, correlative cultural documents, and their informing

sance, the difference

ideologies.

There

is

no evident difference

in

how

are situated in relation to Renaissance history,

Milton’s texts

however

ceived; they are simply an undistorted reflection of

it.

it is

con-

There

a

is

one-to-one relationship between those texts and the culture pro-

ducing them, an easy ideological mirroring with Milton, Masque, appropriating “the Jacobean-Anglican achieving therein

a

coalescence of gender,

via

class,

in

A

media ” and

and imperial

codes like those that exist in the Puritan dimension of Renaissance culture.

The

real evil in this

female sexuality

is

masque

is

“female aggressiveness

the real culprit” with any ideological

Powell.

The new

cultural prestige accorded

Puritan doctrine of the priesthood of

very logic demanded 59

a

all

rough equality

See Masson, The Life ofJohn Milton,

III,

190,

women”

191-92.

.

to

women — “the

true believers ...

for

.

wander-

by Milton’s marriage

ings hinted at being quickly curtailed

Mary

.

by

its

— may have

Feminist Milton

[144]

allowed “Milton to choose

a

woman

for the hero

of his masque,”

but his unhappy marriage ensured that he would never so exalt

woman

in

a

poetry again and would be so “palpably uncomfort-

able” with the positions subscribed to in the divorce tracts, espe-

wife could divorce

cially Tetrachordon (“that a believing

husband”) that divorce as a

itself

a heretic

would be sponsored by Milton only

way of sacrificing women

to the higher calling

of men.

It is

one female witness mentioned by Halpern is cited only to be discredited by a male establishmentarian view of Milton; this woman, not just of the wrong class (as she was for Masson and Henry) but now “a kind of seventeenth-century maenad,” a barbarian, simply does not know how to read the

noteworthy

that the

poet-polemicist

60 .

here by Halpern

A

more

still

— and

it is

all

juxtaposition of this essay on Agonistes

—

that

the

A

set forth

is

more curious because of

the

Masque with another on Samson

Milton always represents

women, when

bered by

curious proposition

men

being dismem-

in fact Milton’s tragedy reverses the

proposition, presenting the image of man dismembering

woman,

and other men. Samson would tear Dalila limb from limb in imitation of the Israelites who had torn the thumbs and toes from their enemies and in anticipation of the Levite who cuts the body of the concubine into twelve pieces. The point of such representations, and of Milton’s tragedy, should be obvious or is made so in a recollection of Roland Barthes’ proposition that “violence

—

follows a code

worn out by

return to violence

is still

millennia of

human

history;

and to

same code .” 61 Having lived War years, Milton would speak

to speak the

through the violence of the Civil another code.

For

the bandying of Marx’s

all

Rewriting the Renaissance,

it is

name

in the introduction to

a collection that

^See Halpern’s “Puritanism and Maenadism

in

A

never in

Masque ,”

its

discus-

in Rewriting the’

pp. 92, 93, 96, 100; cf. John Guillory, “Dalila’s House: Samson Agonistes and the Sexual Division of Labor,” in ibid., p. 122. Renaissance

,

Roland Barthes, Sade/ Fourier /Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 171. Northrop Frye contends that “the scene in which Samson casts her [Dalila] off shows more clearly what the divorce tracts mean than they do themselves” (see Fearjul Symmetry: A Study of William Blake [1947; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962], p. 352). Indeed, this contention is pertinently glossed by the etymology of “Divorce”: in Hebrew, says the anonymous author of An Answer to a Book, a cutting off, a dismemberment (sig. B). 6,

A Confounding

Text and Test Case

sion of Milton envisions a dialectic, either between

[145]

poems or be-

tween a poem and its culture Indeed, the argument here is that Milton not only changes his opinions but also, owing to unhappy 62

.

marriages,

conventionalizes his principles,

holds so steadfastly that the rest of his

life is

to

which he

now

spent breeding rep-

of the mind. Samson Agonistes simply “assumes the subjection of women, a practice to which Milton gives his unequivocal endorsement”; the poem is little more than a mirroring, rather tiles

conventional yet intensified, ot seventeenth-century misogynistic discourse, although the interdependency of the

poem and

its

cul-

of poetry and ideology, of sexuality and politics, is obfuscated by Milton’s displacing his timely concerns and arguments onto a biblical narrative. ture,

We are liar

to

never told that

this particular

displacement

is

not pecu-

Milton but instead characteristic of an age that glimpsed,

indeed lived,

its

own

tragedy through

this scriptural tragedy; that

Samson’s marriage, even if not hinted at in the biblical tale, was for a long time supposed, and often in the seventeenth century presumed; that while Samson may not choose Dalila’s house, neither does he choose his father’s (for quite the same reasons); or that the cutting of Samson’s locks by Dalila, this symbolic castration that

is

without precedent

in the Bible,

is

not Milton’s devis-

ing but an invention of earlier iconography. That

is,

we

are not

being told of the crucial discoveries of recent historical investigations or of consequent reinterpretations of Scripture, chiefly

women. Nor Samson story

are

we informed

that Milton’s adjustment

by

of the

“to serve as a setting for the contemporary institu-

62

Terry Eagleton reminds us of Marx’s contention “that ‘Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reasons that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature’” and elsewhere reveals the kind of entree Marxist criticism might provide to this poem: “No more graphic example of this conjunction [of the linguistic and the political] in English literature can be found than in John Milton’s decision to write Paradise Lost in his native tongue. Milton’s decision

was

a radically political act

— an

assertion of bourgeois Protestant nationalism

and aristocratic culture, or rather an assertive appropriation of those classical modes for historically progressive ends. The very forms and textures of his poem are a product of this linguistic, political and religious conjuncture with ideology”; see, respectively, Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. 45, and his Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976; rpt. Lonover

classical

don: Verso, 1978),

p. 56.

Feminist Milton

[146]

tion of marriage”

is

remodeling of the

a

tale

more properly

ascribed to the age of Milton; that Milton’s supposed construc-

was construed,

tion of “the worst possible case” for Dalila

poet’s

own

century, as the best of

one seemingly intended

in the

possible cases for her, and

all

image of a heroic SamSamson’s double and their

to contravene the

son; that the presentation of Dalila as

respective imitations of one another, ostensibly to disadvantage

may

Dalila,

actually have the contrary effect of diminishing

was

son’s heroism; or that Samson’s heroism

Sam-

also called into

question by juxtaposing his story with that of other biblical he-

such

roes,

as

Deborah. In

many

tory, also

in the Bible or

readings of the

by Milton)

Samson

source.

becomes only be cism.

less so

new

than Milton’s tragedy,

— an

criticism

their is

DeMille than to

curious parody of itself

a

and

Samson Agonistes

closer in spirit to Cecil B.

No

story (as rendered either

scuttled

is

silenced, in the observation that

63

historicism voids his-

that are ascribable to, or witnessed to,

by women. Women’s history

drama”

new

this version,

a

“career

its

biblical

historicism here

example of what can

called, in self-canceling rhetoric, “ahistorical

new

histori-

64

What

here skews interpretation

the critic’s ideology that in

is

turn disfigures Milton’s ideology. Instead of conspiring with es-

tablishmentarian criticism fostered by the male community, and thus

becoming with

that

community

mediator of decidedly pa-

a

— minimizing contradictions misconstruing the reasons them — new wave of feminist

triarchal versions

of texts

their

for

terpretation

in-

might better conspire with Milton’s early female

readership against those last

a

or

poems and

63

who would

hide the ideology of Milton’s

thus conceal the extent to which his poetry dis—

House,” Rewriting the Renaissance, pp. 106, 108, 1 10, 111, and see also p. 120. For recent feminist readings of the Samson story, rich in historical discovery and critical insight, see Mieke Bal, “The Rhetoric of Subjectivity,” pp. 347-71; Marlyn Millner Kahr, “Delilah,” in Feminism and Art History (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 119-25, and “Rembrandt and Delilah,” The Art Bulletin, 55 (1973), 240-59; and esp. Phyllis Trible, Texts of

John Guillory,

Terror:

“Dalila’s

Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia:

Press, 1984),

who,

if

she does not discuss the

Samson

guingly on the Judges narrative (see esp. pp. 65-109). M I owe the language here, if not the concept, to

my

whose reading of this manuscript

at a crucial

story,

Fortress

comments

intri-

colleague Deirdre David,

stage proved invaluable.

— A Confounding turbs the

ton

norms of consensual

may have

said regularly

said

Text and Test Case

a

222).

(II,

47

1

male readership has

of Milton’s poetry, that “custome ...

receiv’d for the best instructor”

1

prose writings, Mil-

belief. In his

of things generally what

[

But Milton

is

silently

said this re-

open “eyes blear’d and dimm’d with prejudice and custom” (II, 565) and wishing to free the human race from the grip of both from “outward conformity” and “conforming stupidity” (II, 563, 564). Milton speaks repeatedly of fraudulent, idle, unsavory traditions (I, 520, 641, 895) of “tyrant custom” and “the tyranny of error, and ill-custome” (I, 583; II, 578; cf. I, 561, 777). “Error supports Custome,” he declares, and “Custome count’nances Error,” both of which have wrought “inveterate blots and obscurities upon our minds” (II, 223, gretfully,

hoping

to

—

—

.

.

.

224).

women, who knew interpretation and waged merito-

Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century all

along the perils of privileged

may be better allies for the feminist enterprise than trend-setting men of our own century, since those women show so persuasively how badly claims for Milton’s conrious battle against

it,

ventionality sort with the actual inner workings of his

and show so powerfully that the is,

not that between

finally,

poems but

a

real dialectic to

poems

be encountered

feminist criticism and Milton’s

between Milton’s poems and the orthodoxies that, representing them, his poetry means to repeal. New modeland this is especially true of Milton are reings of old stories visionary in nature, not mere redactions, and they have the effect of uncensoring scriptural tales disfigured by centuries of already •censored and altogether misguided interpretation. In his last poems, Milton brings out of concealment from a triplet of scriptural tales, then gathers into focus, what those stories were not meanings hidden in those tales by thought to have implied that

—

—

—

their tellers, then silenced

by

their interpreters.

tory of scriptural interpretation

poems

is

To

review the his-

to rehearse the interpretive his-

which in each case is a history of ambush, then mutilation, effected by the imposition of fictive formulae and forms upon those poems. There are other allies for a feminist criticism that might be tory of Milton’s

sought

last

in correlative

criticism,

as well,

and correspondingly disjunctive systems of

most notably

in feminist

hermeneutics of Scripture.

Feminist Milton

[148]

There especially we see what an early feminist criticism saw and what a modern feminist criticism claims not to see in Milton: a “revisionary female theology” rising up as a counter to “the patri-

which is already inscribed in literature.” 65 And there too we find a measure of the extent to which Milton’s last poems, with their scriptural grid, are themselves interrogations of that same patriarchal theology and simultaneously the inauguarchal theology

rator of another revisionary religion, in

words, “higher, purer, tained.

66

far holier”

The concerns of

Thomas De Quincey’s

than the one that then ob-

feminist biblical hermeneutics with

a

discerning contexts (extrinsic and intrinsic) and discovering the

with distin-

different protocols they afford for interpretation,

guishing between meanings that animate the scriptions of a text drifting

first

quo or inveighs

text upholds the status

later in-

by a text’s with determining whether a

and delving into meanings

through time and history,

and

against

lost

it,

with discrimi-

nating between voices and thereupon privileging certain of them,

with deciphering language codes and poetic strategies (many of

them covert), and with from what is eternally to Milton’s poetry

without

a

loss

of Paradise Lost proceed critical

ate,

however

new

historicism.

The 65

valid

and afford

concomitant

respond to the

differentiating

in

— these a

is

culturally

bound

concerns are transferable

way of translating

its

meanings

of poetry. Early feminist translations accordance with the premises

program

reluctantly,

what

—

that

we

are apt

now

— they

to associ-

with deconstructionist discourse and

history of Milton criticism recounted here reveals that a

See Christine Froula,

Economy,”

“When Eve Reads

Critical Inquiry,

Milton:

Undoing

the Canonical

10 (1983), 324. Cf. Margaret A. Farley, “Feminist

Consciousness and the Interpretation of Scripture,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, esp. pp. 42-43. Diane Kelsey McColley’s comments are pertinent: “Modern readers have come to understand the Bible in ways that divest it of antifeminine rabbinical and patristic accretions, and this is the direction in which Milton, with his Reformation fervor for such divestment, is already moving” (McColley, Milton’s Eve [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983], p. 35). See also the important essays by Elisabeth Schtissler Fiorenze, “Emerging Issues in Feminist Biblical Interpretation”; Beverly Wildung Harrison, “Human Sexuality and Mutuality”; and Constance F. Parvey, “Re-membering: A Global Perspective on Women”; all of which are in Christian Feminism: Visions of a New Flumanity, ed. Judith L.

Wcidman

(San Francisco: Harper and

158-79. ^See The Romantics on Milton,

p.

465.

Row,

1984), pp. 33-54, 141-57,

’

A Confounding poem

Text and Test Case

|i49]

survived not only and perhaps not

like Paradise Lost has

principally because of its universality but, as Richard Helgerson

wont

of

to argue, because

its

changing patterns of authority.

“continual reinscription in ever It

survives because

serve powerful interests that have a stake in that,

Helgerson might have argued,

the ideologies instinct in

new

historicism

mation of Christopher tionism, despite

phy.

And

its

is

much

as

is

it

continues to

survival” 67 and

bent upon voiding

historicism and deconstructionism,

Hill’s

origins,

its

now seem

two more empty “isms.” At

leaving us with versions,

new

is

a

least in its

American

derivation from and defor-

hard historicism

deconstruc-

as

an emptying of Derridean philoso-

while both appropriations promise

political neutrality

great and noble spirits, according to Dr. Johnson, abhor neu-

(all

neither

trality),

is

ideologically innocent, as evidenced

by Helger-

son’s admission that America’s radical feminists are not really

toeing the new-historicist line

— which

is

to say that in the subor-

dination of self to collective desire they are neither so individualistic” as their

of the

new

historicists,

male counterparts nor,

“elitist

alas,

like

and

some

“struggling against the truth they es-

pouse.

A

which has not yet made Milton preoccupations, would doubtless answer that it is as im-

radical feminist criticism,

one of its

unmask the unmask Milton’s

portant to is

to

ideological biases of biases,

and

it

new

historicism as

might even suggest

that

it

its

male counterparts concern themselves less with intime resemblances and more with family differences. It is not in their historical enterprise

the

new

so

much

historicists

as in their deconstructionist enterprise that

have found

a

common

identity.

They

are

proud sponsors of cultural dissension not agreement, of aesthetic tension not resolution; they are, in Helgerson’s words, “connoisseurs of conflict” and see the world (through their texts) as “riven by irreconcilable contradictions,” incompatible and antagonistic systems

—

as full

of “internal inconsistency.” 69

One

text they see

67

See Richard Helgerson’s review of Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 48 (1985), 381. ^Ibid.; see also

by Helgerson, “Review

Article,” Comparative Literature, 35

(1983), 364.

Elsewhere Helgerson writes, “An absolutist message can be extracted from Paradise Lost. But so can its republican antagonist. Milton was capable of both, but he was incapable of transcending ei6y

Helgerson, “Review Article,”

p. 362.

Feminist Milton

[150] this dise

way (though it is not yet one of their principal texts) is ParaLost, a poem of competing, not harmonized, ideologies; and

in this they take their stand against the old historicists and,

would seem, queue up with posing ideologies inscribed ical critique is

in Milton’s text,

who found

op-

each affording a rad-

seeming knit of identity there Whereas the new historicists find one ideology

of the other. Yet

also distinction.

the feminists of old

it

in this

maneuvering another into stalemate, feminist criticism historically found this ideology battling that one in a game ending in checkmate. is

What

usually loses out in these Miltonic competitions

the reigning orthodoxy, the prevailing system of values, re-

ceived opinion. In any event, early feminist criticism never aban-

doned hope that

for an apocalyptic

breakthrough and never doubted

Milton nurtured such hope. Indeed,

far

more

so than their

male counterparts of today, female readers have exhibited the po-

throwing Milton criticism into a new register. American versions of both new historicist and deconstructionist criticism are decidedly distant from apocalyptic thinking, but tentiality for

not so indifferent to

promises of historical

do not displace apocalyptic transformation, an enduring objective of a it

that they

What

true feminist criticism, with eschatological despair. historicists

and deconstructionists

from or transcendence of

alike

to

new

seems to be an escape

myth had

history, the apocalyptic

his-

way of addressing history and making sense of it. The apocalyptic myth was a way of glimpsing, as one does in torically

been

a

both Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, the history of history, both

in its specificity

repeat itself but tionist

it

and

in its large design.

History

does rhyme, and every gloss by

need not be

a loss,

a

may

not

deconstruc-

pushing us further into an abyss of

skepticism and indeterminacy.

An

earlier feminist criticism has

ther” (“Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” Studies in English Literature,

SOO- 1900, 26 [1986], 145-99). It is as if poets had but two options available to them: the homogenizing of conflict through submission to a received ideology or husbanding conflict by placing opposing ideologies in question. Milton’s poetry proffers another option: the representation of competing ideologies with an i

attendant privileging of one over the other. In this way, there

of

is

the containment

even intensification of it, by holding competing ideologies under pressure and, correspondingly, the suggestion that a higher truth may be wrung from such conflict, that the transmission of conflict may eventuate in the transcendence of conflict. conflict,

'

A Confounding made

Text and Test Case

[

1

5

1 ]

much so clear that feminists of today should be wary of their own critical enterprise with male-fostered, male-

this

aligning

championed criticisms that segregate the strategies of criticism from the ideologies they were meant to further, that are, as Helgerson concedes, walling stitutions

and wrapping

theory within academic in-

critical

of political neutrality. Parathat are most resistant to New

in a cloak

it

doxically, the theories of literature

Criticism and struggling so hard to distance themselves from

it

sway of the same ideological mythos, the words of Edward Said, a “disin-

are often written under the

which is, in fected” text emptied of social and political concern, of ideological commitment, and the product of which is a criticism that, again as Said reports, “has retreated from its constituency, the citizenry of modern society,” indeed from its own “origins,” which are “insurrectionary.” " It is no accident that poems are being represented as ideologically uncertain and soft by those who are themselves ideologically uncommitted. the yield of

The

“neutrality” or “moderation” (in the case of Stanley Fish)

— with jargons and policy of noninterference — may new

of which some pendence, but

When When

•

it

criticism

historicists

speak

simultaneously forfeits depoliticized,

is

camouflaging

their

foster critical inde-

a critical

consciousness.

so are the texts

it

addresses.

become, along with the criticism they sponsor, compliant to the institutions of civilization and transmitters of its ideologies. By resisting social and political impingements on criticism, such neutrality also disallows political sophistication and historical engagement in the texts that are objects of criticism; it ensures the separation of art and society.

its

A

texts are depoliticized, they

carryover from the

New

Critics, this neutrality

is

no

would bring the stammerings of a text to full utterance, that would analyze the social system with a view to getting it changed, that would construct proper servant for

a

feminist criticism that

models of exchange between

positive, not negative,

art

and so-

ciety.

The new

70

Edward

historicism has proved to be “a delicately selective af-

Said,

The World,

vard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. Society:

Must

We

Choose?”

the Text, 3, 4.

and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

But see

also the

in Representations

,

symposium

12 (1985), 1-43.

pieces in “Art or

Feminist Milton

[152] 71

name opening

itself

and other

historicisms and thereby creating a dilemma.

When

Marjorie

Levinson puts Marx

a strategy

fair,”

its

very

a

breach between

in that breach, she

advances

one of feminist discourse, which has found

own, but

also

a natural

and nurturing

Marx

an ally fiercely resisted in certain

ally,

new

male-sponsored versions of

in

of her

historicism (especially in the

one extreme are neutered and gutless. Levinson restores content to the method, ideology to criticism, in the belief that to remove the former is to short-circuit the latter: “Marx emplots an action the structural and dynamic principle of which is contradiction. The field of these contradictions is the locus of change. ... It is the way his system avoids becoming a United

States) that in

way

machine: the another.” 72

New

history stops being historicists

who

.

.

.

one damned thing

after

obstruct the ideology paralyze

method; they deny the interaction of art and society by denying not literature only but also criticism of its transformational functions. In certain of its American versions, the new historicism stands in defiance of the feminist program and would their

deny feminist

criticism

its

agenda.

Texts are inscribed within structures of

new

authority, but so

too are their interpreters, and this should cause us to ask what

of both

at stake in the survival ity,

and

who

is

is

— how does each subserve author-

the authority? These questions

may

unravel the

paradox of an early feminist criticism pondering Milton by way of promoting its own cause, and a new feminist criticism now

promoting Milton not

how women

in

order to demote him.

manipulate Milton’s text

The in

real

question

is

order to yield up

—

image of the poet, but how women are manipulated and by whom to exchange a feminist’s Milton of historical vintage for the tamed Milton of a community of male readers. Whenever there is containment of the radical and subversive elements in a literary text, there is also a damaging of that text, a deformation of its meaning. And the containment practiced by new historicists, which also affects much feminist criticism, aligns their Milton with the Milton of New Criticism, a Milton alienated from his own world literary, social, political and authis or that

—

—

71

Marjorie Levinson,

University of California 72

Ibid.

“New

—

Historicism: What’s in a

— Los Angeles,

16

November

Name?”

1986).

(Lecture

at

•

A Confounding thoring works

in

age “with no signs of

his old

between poet and

state,”

Text and Test Case

73

mark of

as if the

[153]

connection

a

great poets

is

that

near the thrones and powers of church and state or that

they

sit

their

prophecy can be

tune. In this, the

new

set,

time after time, to the same dissonant

historicists,

and some

who

call

themselves

up against the Milton of history, whose male and female readerships were once united, if not in their interpretations, certainly in their mutual discernment of a political content so explosively controversial that they wondered' aloud how this or that of the last poems got by the censors. In any event, it is the men, not the women, who have historically dismembered this Orphic poet by tearing up (and sometimes out) the pages of feminists, are lining

his poetry.

In

its

fullest realization, a history

of feminist criticism of Mil-

ton will rely increasingly on actual, not fabricated, history and

more

thus will afford an even

valuable prospect on the total his-

tory of Milton criticism hitherto represented by nuclear

cells

of

male discourse. Early female readers of Paradise Lost held in their arms a text full of seemingly dead ideas, a text that was pro-

nounced

corpse by their male counterparts, but they then pro-

a

ceeded to pronounce otherwise: “Look there! look there!

Women

lives.”

readers have infused the Edenic books of Paradise Lost

They were not deluded when they did this, or when in process they made anthology pieces ofjust those parts of Mil-

with the

It

life.

ton’s

poem

that for

now

from anthologies and most of the twentieth century have received only a modithat are

cum @f critical

typically excluded

attention.

What a feminist criticism new literary history but a both male and female but one that toricized.

is

—

a

urges upon us,

finally,

literary history

is

not simply

of Milton’s readers,

“reader-response” criticism, to be sure,

de-idealized, truly professionalized, and

If histories

tilted in the direction

a

of criticism have of men,

it is

until

now

newly

his-

been heavily

certainly time to enlarge the

history to include a record of female response to Milton’s poetry in the

us something important about

men have 73

how Milton was how to read Milton.

understanding that knowing controlled, and

still

Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates,

control,

p. 278.

read It is

may

tell

true that

the climate of critical

Feminist Milton

[154]

opinion, but in this they are currently aided and abetted by

a

fem-

would turn the revolutionary Milton into a reor make a cautious, ideologically mobile Milton out

inist criticism that

actionary,

of

a

bold and inquiring

spirit.

women, namely Eve and

It

has been argued that Milton’s

Dalila, are “blasted” not just

by Mil-

toward and resentment of women, but also by the authority, cultural and poetic, that controls his repre74 when in sentations, the very telling and retelling of his tales fact it is just such authorities and representations that Milton ton’s personal bitterness

,

blasts.

Hans Robert Jauss

is

a crucial

point of reference here, inasmuch

new

perception of literary history and

he has tutored us into

as

of what matters

in

a

such histories.

From him we have

learned to

“Which historical moments are really the ones that first make new that which is new in the literary phenomenon?” and to what ask

degree

is

“this

cal instant

of

.

.

emergence ?” 75

.

already perceptible in the histori-

We

was female readers who uncovered what was “new” in

its

Milton’s early Paradise Lost

new element

and

in this

way

have seen already that

restored the

poem

to

its

it

original

horizon of expectation. Milton’s early female readership thus

opened the way

for the revolution in

Milton criticism that

have come to associate with Romanticism; indeed,

we

seems that this readership not only anticipates the Romantic phase of Milton criticism but is, as well, a motivating force and early sponsor. The eye altering alters all and in so doing advances criticism further in the direction of the Miltonic idealism of taking away the veil and seeing all. Its bogiephobia to the side, Milton’s female it

,

readership established itself long ago as being in the vanguard

of Milton studies, and being there by virtue of its knack for reading Milton with “such proper emphasis .” 76 That is where it, and Milton’s male readership, should be today

— not just

reading

Milton, but reading him with proper emphasis.

“When Eve Reads

74

See Froula,

75

Hans Robert

Milton,”

p. 329.

Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 35. 'See the passage from C. P. Moritz that is the epigraph for this book, p. vi. 7,

,

Appendix

John Clowes,

A

Conversation between

a Father

From The Golden bridge: Printed

of Woman;

Miranda:

or,

A

Wedding-Ring;

by Henning and Guide

to the

A

or,

and His Daughter Thoughts on Marriage (Stour-

The Whole Duty Lady, pp. 1 1 - 16.

Tallis, 1815), in

Female Sex ... By

a

should conceive, that marriage, properly so

I

must mean an union of minds, and united,

it

cannot be properly called

You

a

that if

minds

called,

are not

marriage.

you mean the minds of two persons of different sexes; but have you ever considered what it is which constitutes an union of minds between two persons of different sexes? God, my child, has manifestly by creation, distinguished the man from the woman, and the woman from the man, not only as to

Paternus:

are right ... if by an union of minds

.

.

.

.

.

.

body, but

as to

mind, not only

as to

corporeal strength and

energy, but as to mental faculty, character, and disposition.

For

who

more

cannot discern that the

for the exercise

of the

man

is

by nature formed

intellectual principle in science

and the pursuit of wisdom; whereas the woman is formed more for the exercise of the voluntary or will principle in affection, in gentleness, in softness,

and sweetness of temper

and of manners? Thus the proper distinguishing character of the man is intellect, but the proper distinguishing character of the

woman

is

the love of the man’s intellect.

Hence we

and well-disposed woman attaches herself to a man of understanding and that every sensible and well-disposed man attaches himself most find,

by experience,

to that

that every sensible

woman who most

loves his understanding. Here then

Appendix

[156]

A

ground of the union of minds between two persons of different sexes. For all union of minds proceeds from love, and the union of minds between two persons of different sexes proceeds from this distinct love, that the man loves the woman, because she loves his understanding, and that the is

the true

woman Miranda

loves the

for sake

of his understanding.

What you have been observing

:

tinct character

my

man

and

what

recollection

same

qualities

my

of

.

man and woman,

words

.

brings to

on the and Eve in

favourite poet Milton says

subject, in his beautiful description

Paradise: his

.

concerning the dis-

.

.

.

are these:

—

of Adam

For contemplation he and valour form’d, For softness she, and sweet attractive grace;

He Paternus

for

God

only, she for

You might have added

:

put into

in

him.

what the same poet has the mouth of the angel Raphael on the same subject,

where the

too

.

.

.

angel, in his discourse with

him concerning Eve: What

—

Adam,

thus instructs

high’r in her society thou find’st

Attractive,

Wherein

human,

rational, love

still:

thou dost well, in passion not,

In loving

true love consists not:

The thoughts, and In reason;

You

God

and

see, therefore,

is

Love

refines

heart enlarges; hath his seat

judicious, as the scale.

my

children, that according to the en-

lightened views of this great poet, conjugal union, or marriage, as to

is

grounded

mind

in the eternal distinction

as well as

body, and in

their capacity to bless each

other according to that distinction.

good and wise men,

in all ages,

of the two sexes,

You

see likewise

how

have regarded conjugal love

something sacred and holy, perfectly distinct from what is called lust or passions, and therefore calculated, by its nature as well as by its origin, to raise the soul to heaven and conjoin it with God. as

Appendix

Mary From The

Political

Moniter

:

;

O’Brien, Ode

to

B

Milton

Regent’s Friend (Dublin: Printed for

or,

the Author, 1790), pp. 49-51.

HAIL, happy

bard! with glorious thoughts inspir’d!

judgment sir’d, Thy soul with sweet celestial strains was won, While secret powres led thy fancy on; Immortal themes thy

In tuneful

And

lent

Oh

lofty

bands cherubs around thee hung,

new

graces as the poet sung.

thou poetic prince of graceful use,

Whose

seraph notes ev’n savage minds can please:

smooth numbers of thy verse we stray, Through fabled mazes to eternal day; Where on the rosy beams of bliss we soar, In the

And

the sweet plains of paradise explore.

Still as

A glow

we

read, our sense

is

more

refin’d,

of rapture animates the mind,

Impress’d with beauties rising to our view,

With eager haste the pleasing First

tracks pursue.

of thy race that trod the hallow’d ground,

And gain’d the top of Sion’s sacred mound. Or dar’d with such sublime attempt the lyre, Light by the mystic torch of gospel

Had

the

fire.

Almighty king, enthron’d

in state,

Reveal’d the hidden mysteries of fate;

Unfurl’d the clouds, unveil’d

And

stood confess’d

Descending deign’d,

a

god

th’

expanded sky,

to mortals eye:

in verse celestial rare,

[158]

Appendix B The wond’rous

A

story of the fallen pair,

secret long to angels

Lock’d

in the

knowledge given.

beams of the

blest in heaven;

In Milton’s phrases, the sov’reign

Had

taught the sacred facts to

No more

shall

Lord of Grace,

human

race.

pagan poetry decoy,

Our riper judgment to the feats of Troy. To Greece and Rome such mortal themes belong; More perfect truths beam forth in Milton’s song.

How

poor

that painter’s skill,

Who

drew

the meditating poet blind!

how

unrefin’d,

His thoughts beyond weak nature ne’er aspired;

He knew

not Milton’s light to Heav’n

As round

the

retir’d!

world the lamp of Phoebus

plays,

In diff’rent quarters darts refulgent rays,

To eastern climes he moves in awful plight, And bursts in floods of glory on their sight; So Milton’s orbs, eclips’d to human eye, Blaz’d in meridian flame beyond the sky;

His lamps of light in higher regions burn’d,

From

earthly sparks to heav’nly glory turn’d!

Appendix

Hannah More on Sentiment and From

Essays on

Various Subjects (London:

T.

C

Principle

Wilkie and T.

Cadell, 1777), pp. 95-102.

...

of the sentimental character, to imagine that none but the young and the beautiful have any right to the pleasures of society, or even to the common benefits and blessings of It

life.

is

a part

Ladies of this turn also affect the most lofty disregard for

useful qualities and domestic virtues; and this

quence: for as this sort of sentiment

who

is

only

a

a natural

conse-

weed of idleness, she

constantly and usefully employed, has neither leisure nor

propensity to cultivate

A

is

is

it.

sentimental lady principally values herself on the enlarge-

ment of her notions, and her

liberal

way of thinking. This

superi-

of soul chiefly manifests itself in the contempt of those minute delicacies and little decorums, which, trifling as they may be thought, tend at once to dignify the character, and to restrain the levity 'of the younger part of the sex.

ority

‘

Perhaps the error here complained

of, originates in

mistaking

and principle for each other. Now I conceive them to be extremely different. Sentiment is the virtue of ideas, and principle the virtue of action. Sentiment has its seat in the head, principle in the heart. Sentiment suggests fine harangues and subtile distinc-

sentiment

and performs good actions in consequence of them. Sentiment refines away the simplicity of truth and the plainness of piety; and, as a celebrated wit [Voltaire] tions; principle conceives just notions,

has remarked of his no less celebrated contemporary, gives us

words and vice in deeds. Sentiment may be Athenian, who knew what was right, and principle demonian who practiced it. virtue in

called the

the Lace-

[i59]

Appendix

[160]

But these

qualities will

consideration of

which

C be better exemplified by an attentive

two admirably drawn

characters of Milton,

are beautifully, delicately, and distinctly marked.

These

who may not improperly be called the Demon of SentiAbdiel, who may be termed the Angel of Principle.

are, Belial, ment',

and

Survey the picture of Belial, drawn by the sublimest hand that ever held the poetic pencil.

A

fairer

perion lost not heav’n; he seem’d

For dignity compos’d, and high exploit,

But all was false and hollow, tho’ his tongue Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear

The

better reason, to perplex

Maturest counsels, for

To

his

and dash

thoughts were low,

vice industrious, but to nobler deeds

Tim’rous and

slothful; yet

he pleas’d the

ear.

Paradise Lost, B.II

Here

and exquisite representation of art, subtilty, wit, fine breeding and polished manners: on the whole, of a very accomplished and sentimental spirit. is

a lively

Now turn

and unsophisticated Abdiel,

to the artless, upright,

Faithful

Among Among

found

the faithless, faithful only he

innumerable

false,

Unshaken, unseduc’d,

unmov’d.

unterrified;

His loyalty he kept, his love,

his zeal.

Nor number, nor example with him wrought To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind, Though single. Book V But

it is

not from these descriptions, just and striking as they

are, that their characters are so perfectly

known,

as

from an ex-

amination of their conduct through the remainder of

this divine

work: in which it is well worth while to remark the consonancy of their actions, with what the above pictures seem to promise. It will also be observed, that the contrast

between them

is

kept up

Hannah More on Sentiment and

Principle

[161]

throughout, with the utmost exactness of delineation, and the

most animated strength of colouring. found, that Belial talked

and Abdiel

all,

With words Counsel’d ignoble

Not

still

did

a

all.

review

it

will

be

The former,

cloath’d in reason’s guise,

and peaceful

ease,

On

sloth,

peace.

Book

II

you will constantly find the eloquence of action. When tempted by the rebellious angels, with what retorted scorn with what honest indignation he deserts their multitudes, and retreats from their contagious society! In Abdiel

,

All night the dreadless angel

unpursued

Through heaven’s wide champain

held his way.

Book VI

No wonder

he was received with such acclamations of joy by

the celestial powers,

when

there

was But one,

Yes, of so

many myriads

Return’d not

fall’n,

but one

lost.

Ibid.

And

afterwards, in a close contest with the arch fiend,

A

On

noble stroke he

lifted

high

the proud crest of Satan. Ibid.

What was

the effect of this courage of the vigilant and active

seraph?

Amazement The rebel throne, but greater Thus foil’d their mightiest.

seiz’d

rage to see

Appendix

[162]

C

Abdiel had the superiority of Belial

combat,

as

much

in the warlike

as in the peaceful counsels.

Nor was That he

who

Shou’d win

in

it

ought but just,

debate of truth had won,

arms, in both disputes alike

in

Victor.

But notwithstanding I have spoken with some asperity against sentiment as opposed to principle, yet I am convinced, that true genuine sentiment, (not the sort I have been describing) may be so connected with principle, as to bestow on it its brightest lustre, and its most captivating graces. And enthusiasm is so far from being disagreeable, that

a

portion of

it

woman. But

is

perhaps indispensably

must be the enthusiasm of the heart, not of the senses. It must be the enthusiasm which grows up with a feeling mind, and is cherished by a virtuous education; not that which is compounded of irregular passions, and artificially refined by books of unnatural fiction and improbable adventure. will even go so far as to assert, that a young woman necessary in an engaging

it

I

cannot have any ciple,

if

real greatness

she has not

of soul, or true elevation of prin-

a tincture

of what the vulgar would

call

Romance, but which persons of a certain way of thinking will discern to proceed from those fine feelings, and that charming sensibility, without which, though a woman may be worthy, yet she can never be amiable.

Appendix

D

Hannah More’s Ccelebs on Milton’s Eve From More

I

Ccelebs in Search o f a (11 vols.;

Wi fe

London: Printed

for T. Cadell, 1830), VII, 1-7.

have been sometimes surprised when

been expressing state

my

expected

it

in

conversation

I

have

admiration of the character of Eve in her

drawn by our immortal poet, to hear objecby those, from whom of all critics I should have least

of innocence,

tions started

The Works of Hannah

(1808), in

— the

as

ladies.

I

confess, that as the Sophia of Rousseau

had her young imagination captivated by the character of Fenelon’s Telemachus, so I early became enamoured of that of Milton’s Eve.

I

never formed an idea of conjugal happiness, but

my

mind involuntarily adverted to the graces of that finished picture. The ladies, in order to justify their censure, assert, that Milton, a

harsh domestic tyrant, must needs be a very inadequate judge,

and of course

These

fair

which

I

a

very unfair delineator of female accomplishments.

cavillers

draw

their inference

from premises, from

have always been accustomed to deduce

trary'conclusion.

They

insist that

it is

a directly

con-

highly derogatory from the

dignity of the sex, that the poet should affirm that

it is

the perfec-

tion of the character of a wife,

To

And good works

Now,

according to

my

study household good,

in her

husband

to

promote.

notion of “household good,” which

does not include one idea of drudgery or

servility,

but which in-

and comprehensive scheme of excellence, I will venture to affirm, that let a woman know what she may, yet if she knows not this, she is ignorant of the most indispensable, the most appropriate branch of female knowledge. Without it, howvolves

a large

[163]

[164]

Appendix

ever she

may

D

inspire admiration abroad, she will never excite es-

teem, nor of course durable affection,

at

home, and

will bring

neither credit nor comfort to her ill-starred partner.

The domestic arrangements of such a woman as filled the capacious mind of the poet, resemble, if may say it without profaneness, those of Providence, whose under-agent she is. Her wisI

dom

is

seen in

its effects.

Indeed,

it is

rather

felt

than seen.

It is

acknowledged in the peace, the happiness, the virtue of the component parts; in the order, regularity, and beauty of the whole system, of which she is the moving spring. The perfection of her character, as the divine poet intimates, does not arise from a prominent quality, or a showy talent, or a brilliant accomplishment, but it is the beautiful combination and result of them all. Her excellences consist not so much in acts as in habits, in sensibly

Those thousand decencies which From all her words and actions.

A

description this,

more

daily flow

calculated than any

I

ever met with, to

convey an idea of the purest conduct resulting from the best principles. It gives an image of that tranquility, smoothness, and quiet beauty, which is of the very essence of perfection in a wife; while the happily-chosen verb Jlow takes away any impression of dulness, or stagnant torpor, which the still idea might otherwise suggest.

But the offence taken by the ladies against the uncourtly bard is chiefly occasioned by his having presumed to intimate that conjugal obedience

Is

This that

on

is

woman’s

highest honour and her praise.

so nice a point that

this delicate

as a bachelor, dare

only just hint,

question the poet has not gone an inch farther

than the apostle. Nay, Paul

is still

more

uncivilly explicit than

however, could hope to bring over to my side critwho, being of the party, are too apt to prejudge the cause,

Milton. ics,

I,

If,

would point out

I

I

them that the supposed harshness of the observation is quite done away by the recollection that this scrupled “obedience” is so far from implying degradation, that it is conto

•

Hannah More’s Calebs on Milton’s Eve

woman

nected with the injunction to the

works”

in her

“to

a

influence that raises her condition, and restores her to

But

to return to the

the dig-

the associate but the in-

consummate specimen and

how

dignified!

I

am

beautiful

How exquisitely conceived of Raphael! How modest and

and elegance.

skill

her reception and entertainment

yet

all

economical part of the character of Eve.

here she exhibits a

model of domestic is

degree of

of his virtues.

spirer

And

makes her not only

it

165]

promote good

husband; an injunction surely inferring

nity of equality;

[

afraid

know some husbands who would

I

have had to encounter very ungracious looks, not to say words, if they had brought home even an angel, unexpectedly, to dinner.

Not

so our general mother:

—

Her despatchful Her hospitable thoughts,

What all

.

.

intent

choice to choose for delicacy best,

“prompt” but the cheerful “obedience.”

indicate not only the

Though

.

looks,

her request consisted only of the fruits of Paradise,

Whatever

earth, all-bearing

mother,

yields:

yet of these, with a liberal hospitality,

She gathers tribute

large,

and on the board

Heaps with unsparing hand.

The

finest

modern

lady need not disdain the arrangement of

her table, which was

So contrived

as

not to mix

Tastes not well joined, inelegant, but bring

Taste after

It

must, however,

taste,

I

upheld by kindliest change.

fear be

conceded, by the way, that

“taste after taste” rather holds out an

encouragement

to

this

second

courses.

When it

this

unmatched

trio

had finished

be observed, before they tasted,

Adam

their repast,

which,

acknowledged

that

let

[

1

Appendix

66]

D

These bounties from our Nourisher

From whom

all

perfect

are given,

good descends.

Milton, with great liberality to that sex against which he

longer after

ac-

Eve to sit much dinner than most modern husbands would allow.

much

cused of so

is

severity, obligingly permitted

She had attentively listened to all the historical and moral subjects so divinely discussed between the first Angel and the first Man; and, perhaps, there can scarcely be found a a delicately attentive wife,

more

beautiful trait of

than she exhibits, by withdrawing

at

the exact point of propriety. She does not retire in consequence

of any look or gesture, any broad sign of impatience,

any

command

much

less

or intimation of her husband; but with the ever-

watchful eye of vigilant affection and deep humility:

When by

his

countenance he seemed

Entering on thoughts abstruse,

by her own quick intuition of what was right and delicate, she withdrew. And here again how admirably does the poet sustain her intellectual dignity, softened by a most tender stroke of conjugal affection: instructed only

Yet went she not,

as

not with such discourse

Delighted, or not capable her ear

Of what was high — such pleasure Adam relating, she sole auditress.

On

she reserved, .

.

.

which her absence occasioned, methinks I hear some sprightly lady, fresh from the Royal Institution, express her wonder why Eve should be banished by her husband from Raphael’s fine lecture on astronomy which follows; was not she as capable as Adam of understanding all

he

perusing, however, the

said,

tete-a-tete

of Cycle and Epicycle, Orb on Orb?

however, the imaginary fair objector will take the trouble to read to the end of the eighth book of this immortal work, it will If,

Hannah More’s Ccelcbs on Milton’s Eve

[167]

both the poet and the heroine, when she contemplates the just propriety of her being absent before Adam raise in her estimation

on the account of the formation, beauty, and attractions of his wife, and of his own love and admiration. She will farther observe, in her progress through this divine poem, that the author is so far from making Eve a mere domestic drudge, an unpolished

enters

housewife, that he pays an invariable attention even to external elegance in his whole delineation, ascribing grace to her steps,

and dignity to her gesture.

He

uniformly keeps up the same com-

bination of intellectual worth and polished manners:

For softness she, and sweet attractive grace.

And

her husband, so far from

a churlish insensibility to

her

perfections, politely calls her

Daughter of God and Man, accomplished Eve.

I

will not,

however, affirm

that

Adam,

or even Milton, an-

nexed to the term accomplished precisely the idea with which associated in the mind of a true modern-bred lady. If it be objected to the poet’s gallantry, that he remarks

How

beauty

is

excell’d

And wisdom, which remembered

let it'be

of Eve

herself,

by manly

alone

is

grace,

truly

fair;

that the observation proceeds

and thus adds

it is

to her other graces,

from the lips the crowning

grace of humility.

But

it

is

high time that

I

should proceed from

my

criticism

The connection, and of course the transition, will be found more natural than may appear, till developed by my to myself.

slight narrative.

Index

Adams,

Addison, Joseph, Aers, David, 9

1

— Revelation, 25-26, — Ruth, 104 — Timothy,

no

Jane, xvii, 56,

13-14

1

Aikin, John, 13, 17, 42, ill, 129-30 Aikin, Lucy, xvii, xviii, 49 Allestree, Richard, 125

Areopagitica, 45, 73, 109

98, 101 49, 52-53,

Bradburn, Eliza, xvii, 76, 77—78, Bradshaigh, Lady, 58-59

84, 88

Brecht, Richard, xxii

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 100-101, 109

Mieke, 19, 136 Barbauld, Anna Letitia,

16

Blamire, Susannah, xvii, 39 Blindness, xx, 158 Bloom, Harold, 8, 27 Bluestockings, xvii Bowdler, Maria, 39

Anderson, Douglas, 9 Apology for Stnectymnuus, An, 19

Armstrong, Nancy, xii, Astell, Mary, xvi, xviii, 124-25 Attaway, Mrs., 138-43

106, 141

Blackburne, Francis, 68 Blake, William, xx, 19, 46, 106, 115, 1

Alter, Robert, 103

101, 133

Bal,

xvii, xviii, 6,

73, 74 •Baron, Richard, 16 Barrow, Samuel, 23, 24-25, 100 Barthes, Roland, 112, 113, 144 Bate, Walter Jackson, 44

Bronte, Emily, 15, 32 Bryant, Anita, xii, I Bryant, J. A., 136 Buchanan, James, 63 Burke, Kenneth, 122

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 65,

81

Caroline, Queen, Consort of George

II,

55 Carter, Elizabeth,

Bentley, Elizabeth, xvii, xix

ix, xvi, 18, 64 Cary, Mary, 108-09 Cave, Jane, 65 Censorship, 23-24, 26, 28-30, 38-39

Bentley, Richard, 55

Chapone, Hester,

Bayle, Peter, 119 Bennett, Joan, xxi

Benthem, H.

L., 23

,

57, 63, 113

Bible, 3, 20, 25, 34, 47, 84, 97, 103, 120, 141, 145,

147-48

—Genesis, 25-26, 66-67, 77-78, 135 —Gospels, 25-26, 157 48,

99, 100, 101,

—

1

17,

-Joel,

17,

101, 108,

108

—Judges, 25-26,

ix

Charles I, 18 Chaucer, Geoffrey, xix Chudleigh, Mary, Lady, xvi, xix, 5152, 88 Civil War (Puritan Revolution), 25-26, 109, 144

101, 105, 121,

125-

26, 127, 128, 131-32, 133, 134, 145

Clowes, John, xiii-xiv, 155-56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 81, 82, 113

7

1

[

1

5

1

Index

70]

Collier, John, 100 Collier, Margaret, xvi, 58

Cotnus, 6-7, 14, 29, 45, 68, 80, 129,

143-44 Conarroe, Joel, v Cooper, Anna Julia, 36-37

Cowley, Abraham, Cromwell, Oliver,

Gallagher, Philip, 9 Gilbert, Sandra, xx-xxi, 7-8, 12, 75, 76, 78

Ginsberg, Allen,

1

Goodwin, Thomas, 96 Gould, Robert, 48

Graham, Catherine Macaulay,

49, 57 18

Curran, Stuart, xxi Dante, Alighieri, 101-02, 107 Darbishire, Helen, 83 David, Deirdre, xxi-xxii, 146 Davidson, Marie, xxii Davies, Stevie, 1

Griffin, Dustin, 20, 51

Deborah,

Gubar, Susan,

Greenblatt, Stephen, 43 Greene, Gayle, x

Greenwood, James,

126, 127 Deconstruction, ix, xx, 43, 86-87, 88, 89, 128,

148-49

De

Doctrina Christiana, 29, 126, 127 Delilah, 125-26. See also Samson

Agonist es

De De

Mille, Cecil B., 146

Quincey, Thomas, 148

Derrida, Jacques, 43, 88, 128 Di Salvo, Jackie, xxi

Haywood,

12, 75,

78

Eliza, xvi, xvii, xviii,

57-58,

88

Heinemann, Margot, 128

35, 58, 140-41, 143

Helgerson, Richard, xx, 135, 149-50,

Dodd, William, 62 Donne, John, 105 Drabble, Margaret,

8,

1 1

Haak, Theodore, 16, 22-23 Hagstrum, Jean, 8 Halpern, Richard, 138-43 Hardinge, George, 31 Hartman, Joan E., 8 Hayley, William, 6, 20, 21 Hays, Mary, xvii, xviii, 68

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The, xii,

72. See

Macauley, Catherine Graham, George, 58 Greathead, Miss, 75 Green, George Smith, 21 also

151 1

Dryden, John, 49, 53-54, 57, 100 du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste Sieur, 127

Dunbar, Charles, 64 Dunton, John, 26-27, 125

Heninger, S. K., 104 Henry, Nathaniel, 139-40, 144 Herbert, George, 57 Hicks, J. D., 1 Hill, Christopher, 23-24, 28, 31, 96, 133-34, 149

New

Historicism. See

Egerton, Sarah Fyge, xvi,

xviii,

Historicism;

Old

Historicism

48

Eikonoklastes, 45

History oj Britain, The, 45

Ellwood, Thomas, 26 Epic, 6, 23-25, 73, 75, 100-01, 107

Hodge, Bob, 9 Homer, xvii, 63,

Euripides, 17 Examiner, The, 74

Huntingtower, Catherine Rebecca, 72-

71, 107

73

Feminist Criticism, 1 — 15, 137-54 Ferguson, Margaret, 138 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, xvi, 54 Fish, Stanley, 8, 27, 111-12, 116, 138,

151

Huntley, John, 135 Hutton, Lucy, xvii, 66-67, 84, 88, 89 II

Penseroso, 45

lser,

Wolfgang, 83

Jago, Richard,

1

1

Jameson, Fredric, 74

Fordyce, James, 84 Foucault, Michel, 98, 100, 123 Fowler, Alastair, 112 Freud, Sigmund, 8 Froula, Christine, 12-13, 102,

Jauss,

Hans Robert,

Jenney, William, 140-42 Johnson, Samuel, 31, 68, 77, 1 1

Margaret, 37

Kahn, Coppelia, x

Fuseli,

Henry,

Kaplan, Cora,

115

25, 32, 40, 102,

154

Fuller,

3,

5,

1

1

13-14

]

Index Keats, John, 115 Kermode, Frank,

New

Historicism, xx, 43, 116-17, 54. See also Old Historicism

5

Newton, Isaac, Sir, xvii-xviii, 71 Newton, Judith Lowdcr, 117 Newton, Rev. J., no Newton, Thomas, 16-19, 21-22,

Kerrigan, William, xxi Kirwin, William, xxii

Kolodny, Annette, 137 Kozintsev, Grigori, 103

28, 55-56, 61,

Lacan, Jacques, 127 Lady’s Magazine, 42

Landor, Walter Savage, 81-82, 129 Landy, Marcia, 38-39, 99 Leavis, F. R., 1, 49, 116 1 2, Levinson, Marjorie, 116-17, 152 Lewalski, Barbara, 7-8, 85, 104, 108 Lewis, C. S., 1 12, 16 Lieb, Michael, xxi, 20, 21, 69-70, 71 Luther, Martin, 108, 127 Lycidas, 28, 31, 45, 80 1

1

Macaulay, Catherine, xvi, xviii, 35, 72 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 121 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 13, 55,148 MacLaine, Shirley, 1 Madan, Judith, 64 Makin, Bathshua, 51 Malcolm X, 1 March, John, 132 Marivaux, Pierre, 43 Marriage, xiv, 10, 12, 105, 155-56 Marriott, Thomas, 59-61 Marvell, Andrew, 16, 22-23, 24-25, 38, 59, 60-61 Karl,

144, 152

8,

Masque, A. See Comus Masson, David, 139-43 Maurice, Frederick Denison, Michelangelo, 3, 118 Miller, *J. Hillis, 86,

Mitchell,

1

1

3—

1

71

1

3

1

8—

26,

129

4,

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 132, 135 Nyquist, Mary, xxi, 50

L’ Allegro, 45

Marx,

[

no

88-89

Hannah, x-xi,

12

O’Brien, Mary, xvii, xx, O’Connell, Michael, xxi f Education, 45, 80

157-58

15, 65,

O

Old Historicism,

xx, 116, 150. See also Historicism

New Olsen,

On

Tillie, 28,

the Forcers

44

of Conscience, 139

Otway, Thomas, 17, 54 Oveis, Thomas, xxi-xxii Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan), xvii,

xiii,

75

Pagels, Elaine, 68, 99 Paradise Lost, xxii, 10, 83-118, 119, 130, 148, 149-50. 153. 157-58; Abdiel

160-62;

in, 34,

Adam

in, xi, 6,

n,

57-58, 59, 65, 66-67, 77, 82, 83, 85-96, 99, 103-9, 115, 117, 156, 158, 165-66, 167; adaptations of, 46, 115; and al14, 36, 39, 40, 42, 50, 56,

legory, 114; ambiguities

in, 27; apoc109-10, 150; Belial in, 34, 160-62; and Bible, 25, 65, 67-68, 76, 84, 99-100, no, 117; and canon formation, x; and censorship, 23-24, 38-39, 116; and Christianity, 61-62,

alypse

in,

85; contexts for, 25; contradictions in,

and critical dreams in, 104-6,

14, 41, 77, 85,

in- 12;

history,

114;

Morgan, Lady. See Owenson, Sydney

115; Edenic books, 40, 56, 62, 63, 66-67, 7 2 -73. 74. 81, 82, 89-96, 97, 98-100, 153; editions of, 44-45; and educational system, 4, 39-40, 62-63, 80-81; emergent readings of, 8; as epic, 5, 23-25, 75, 100-101; evangelizing of, 61-62; Eve in, 3, 4, 6, io-ii, 13, 19, 21-22, 35-36, 37, 39,

Moritz, C. P.,

40, 42, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57-59, 60, 64,

Mollenkott, Virginia, 68

Montagu, Elizabeth, 2, 18, 33-34, 6465, 87-88 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, xvi, 58 More, Hannah, xvi, 4, 18, 30, 32-35, 39-40, 65-66, 89, 105, no, 159-62, 163-67 vi, 2,

4

Moses, 67, 73, 115, 133 Moyers, Bill, Munich, Adrienne, 99, 119, 138 Murry, Ann, xvii, xviii, 64 Myers, Mitzi, 34 1

65, 66-67, 77, 80-82, 83, 84-96, 99, 100, 102, 103-9, 115, 117, 154, 156, 158, 163-67;

God

in, 37, 56, 76, 85,

89, 90-91, 93. 94, 95, 96, 114—15; ,” 36, “Grace was in all her steps .

42, 58, 71, 89;

“Hee

for

only

New

63, 77, 78, 81, 86-87, 156;

Criticism, 151

.

.

.

God

Nardo, Anna, 104

.

.

,” xi, xiv, 7, 41, 55, 57,

heroism

Index

[172] Paradise Lost

(

— Book IX, 50 — Book X, 54 — Books XI and XII,

continued)

102; historical readings of, 8;

in,

history of history

in,

17,

criticism, 148-49;

its

18, 80,

109, 114, 117;

horizons of expectation for, 5-6, 2223, 38, 40, 64, 67-68, 83; and ideology, 82, 117; illustrations for, 1 imitations of, 56; Michael in, 1 5; 11, 85, 89; and millenarianism, 1 10; Milton’s attitude toward women in, 1-2, 3, 4, 12-13, 16-19, 36, 4142, 53-54; Milton’s readership (esp. women), 2, 3, 5, 12, 32, 41, 44-82; and Milton’s republicanism, xiii;

misogyny

xix, xx-xxi,

in,

85, 95-96, 97, 101, 103, in,

1

8,

17;

19, 84,

morality

Morning Hymn, 35, 46, 55, naming in, 99; narrative order in,

18;

103;

76;

Nimrod

passage, 114;

of Creation doxy, 14, 16, .

.

35, 52;

.

“O

fairest

and ortho-

27-28, 69, 77-78; and

17, 21, 26,

103; paraphrases of,

patriarchy, x, xi-xii, xv, xix,

8,

29-

as poetry, 79;

30, 94-96, 101, 117-18; and poetry anthologies, 45-46, 56, 153; politics in, 17, 18, 23-24, 49, 74, 76, 109, 1 17; and popular culture, 5; as prophecy, n, 23, 24-25, 101,

102, 104-6, 108-9,

1

14; as

x,

n,

12, 22,

46, 59, 62, 65, 73-74, 75, 81, 82, 95,

prophetic

and prose works, xiii, 5, 58, 68, 109; Raphael in, 10, 21, 35-36, 57, 67-68, 77, 89, 90, 91-92, 93-94, 95, 99, 106, 156, 165-66; religion in, 18; rhyme, 50, 58; Samson and Delilah in, 50; Satan in, 4, 11, 14, 19, 20, 48-49, 50, 58, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89-91, 92, 95, 99, 102, 161;

96, 97, 99, 103-17 Paradise Regained, 10, 20, 25-26, 27, 29,

45, 48, 56, 62, 73, 80, 107, 1

no,

1

17,

119-20

18,

Pastoral, 75 Patrides, C. A., 12

Patterson, Annabel, xxi, 24, 28, 38 Pearce, Donald, xxi

Peczenik,

F.

,

12

Pedia, Mrs.,

vi, 35 William, 40 Plumptre, Anna, 75 Poetical Miscellany, The, 62

Pitt,

Poovey, Mary,

76

3,

Pope, Alexander,

vi,

49

Porter, Jane, xvii

Powell, Mary, 143

Poynton, Priscilla, xvii, xix Prometheus, 2 Prophecy, 23-25, 73, 101, 114 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, 20, 45,

70

Quakers, 108-09 Quilligan, Maureen, xxi, 49, 53

critique, 120;

sexual politics of, 74, 82, 86-87, 9°“ 96, 99-100,

1

17;

Son

in,

17, 56,

90-91, 95, 96, 109; sonnets in, 103-5; strategies in, 11-12, 1314, 43, 85, 87-88, 96; subversion in, xiii, xix, 13, 16, 22-23, 26, 27-28, 43, 88, 96-97, 102-3, 106-9, 1 3, 85, 89,

1

1

14-15,

poem, U-15; “Those

xvi, xviii

Readie and Basie Way, The, 45, 70 Revard, Stella, xxi Rewriting the Renaissance, 138-46 Reynolds, Frank, 1

Reynolds, John Hamilton, 74 Rice, John, 63 Richardson, Esther Harbage, v Richardson, Samuel, 38, 58, 59 Robinson, Mary, xvi, xvii, 13, 30 Rogers, Katharine, 11-12, 49, 130 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 163 Russ, Joanna, 16, 28 Ruthven, K. K., 1, 16, 44, 83, 99, 119

134; as theological

17, 37, 76, 77,

1

thousand decencies

.

.

.

164; title

101; translations of, 45, 57; and vision, 107; and warfare, 71; as a

of,

woman’s text, x, 14 Books and II, 39 Book III, 46 Book IV, 35, 46 Book VI, 10-11, 17,

— — — — — Book

Mary Ann,

Radcliffe,

St. St.

Samson,

Samson Agonistes, 45,

1

17,

1

107, 14

1,

Doob, 97 127Samson Agonistes

121, 123, 124, 125,

19,

28, 131-32. See also 18, 39, 62,

21

St. Paul, xi, 20, 67, 68, 76,

164 Sakenfield, Katharine

I

63, 72, 75, 76, 109 VII, 46, 58

Edward, 61, 151 John of Patmos, 73 Maur, Raymond de,

Said,

1

8,

14, 17, 25-27, 29, 1 119-37, 144-46; and 1

,

apocalyptic myth, 150; as

5

1

Index autobiography, 135; and Book of

Stevens, Matthew, 47

Judges, 121, 131-32, 145; Chorus in, 11, 18, 19, 128-29, 130, 131, 134-35, 136; conservative views in, 120;

Stillingfleet,

history of, 121, 125, 136-37;

critical

Dalila in, 27, 122, 124,

1

“ 33 34

,

136,

146, 154; dramatic subterfuge in, 1

Benjamin, Stone, Lawrence, 8

73 ]

1

Strachey, Lytton, ix

Suckling, John,

Sir,

57

Swedenborg, Emanuel,

Symmons,

19

Caroline, xvii, 2

22; and the fragmented body, 127-

28; as history, 122, 132, 135, 136;

Talbot, Catherine, xvi,

influence of, 136; interrogtion

Tasso, Torquato, 107 Taylor, Thomas, 132 Tennenhouse, Leonard,

in,

122, 130-31, 132; Jael/Dalila

equation

in,

126-27; misogyny

in,

1 19, 128-29, 133-34, US; the omission of Samson’s mother, 119; and orthodoxy, 26-27, 12 1, 128; patriarchy in, 19; as prophecy, 132; revenge motif, 128; Samson’s death, 27; Samson’s debasement, 122; Samson’s heroism, 124, 133, 134, 136, 146; Samson’s marriages, 12728, 145-46; satire in, 129; subversion 1

in,

1

21

;

title of,

123, 131; as tragedy,

131-32; and typology, 132 Satan, 2. See also Paradise Lost

Seward, Anna, xvi, 10,

xvii, xviii, 31, 39,

Mary,

xii,

Tenure

of

18

98, 101

xi

Kings and Magistrates, The, 80

Tetrachordon, 17, 144

Thompson, Roger,

10, 13

Thorpe, James, v Thyer, Robert, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 26 Tragedy, 73, 101, 130-31, 132, 135-36 Trapp, Joseph, 16 Treatise of Civil Power, A, 45, 70

Trimmer, Sarah, Typology, 132

30, 32, 35

14

1

6—7

Virginity, 2, Voltaire, 87,

ill

1 14, 159 Voorhis, Charlotte Calvin, v

Sexual difference, 155-56 Sexual equality, 165 Shakespeare, William, 19, 72, 87 Shawcross, John, xxi Shelley,

xviii, 6,

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord,

Virgil, 63, 71, 107,

Satire, 73

1

1

[ 1

Walker,

xvii, xviii, 15, 32, 36,

Waller,

Edmund,

49, 57

Walsh, William, 125

78-81, 84, 88, 101 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 36, 79-80, 82,

101-2 Shullenberger, William,

Mary (Lady Mary Hamilton),

xvi, xviii, 35

9,

13

Siddons, Sarah, xvii, 75, 76, 77, 88

Smithy Benjamin, xvii

Watson, Brooks, 36 Webber, Joan Malory, xx-xxi Wesley, John, 61-62 West, Jane, xvi, xviii, 30, 71, 88-89, 1

6

Smith, Charlotte, xvi-xvii, Smith, Elizabeth, xvi, xviii, xix, 39 Smith, William, 57 Spenser, Edmund, 49, 60, 107 xviii,

Sprint, John, 50-51

Sonnet, 103 Sonnet XI, 140 Sonnet XII, 140 Southey, Robert, 81-82, 129 Stein, Arnold, 135 Stenton, Doris Mary, 10, 32, 51, 108

1

Wheatley, Phillis, xvii, Wicksteed, Joseph, 121

36, 121

Wollstonecraft, Mary, xvii, xviii, 2-3, 13

.

32 - 33

,

35-36, 41-42, 76, 78, 84,

88

Woods, Susanne, xxi Woolf, Virginia, 78-79

Wordsworth, William, 81, 115 Wray, Mary, xvii, 53-54, 84, 88, 89 Yearsley, Ann, xvi,

2,

64-65

4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicadon Data Wittreich, Joseph

Anthony.

Feminist Milton. Bibliography:

p.

Includes index.

— Criticism and interpretation — History. Criticism — Great Britain — History. Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise Lost. Women — England — Books and reading. Feminist i.

Milton, John, 1608-1674

2.

3.

4.

criticism.

5.

I.

Title.

PR3587.3.W58

ISBN

821'. 1987 0-8014-2069-5 (alk. paper)

87-47607

literary