Term Paper on "John Milton Sonnets"

Term Paper 4 pages (1663 words) Sources: 2

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Milton's Sonnets

John Milton's Sonnets: Paradise Lost, Comus & the Divorce Pamphlets

Male / Female Relationships, a Critical Analysis

Milton was a self-selecting but by no means easily manageable subject for feminist critics: his most important work was, after all, based upon a representation of the original man and woman. Milton is operating within a '"masculinist" patristic' framework, cultural and religious. In his representation of Eve he dramatizes and reinforces the ingrained perception of woman as, in various ways, allied to the more dangerous and degenerate human tendencies. Consequently Paradise Lost has functioned for women readers and, significantly, for women writers as a dominant, even threatening, cultural monolith (Nyquist, 1999). Gilbert argues that the poem remained largely unchallenged in its literary presentation of the archetypes of male and female characteristics up to the beginning of the twentieth century. Women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century's (Gilbert emphasizes the work of the Brontes and Virginia Woolf), found themselves dealing not only with non-literary social codes of gender stereotyping but also with a literary text which claims to describe, indeed verify, the origins of these socio-cultural abstracts. So, according to Gilbert, women both as literary subjects and as readers of literature were continually shadowed by the presence of Eve, the archetype of naivete, gullibility, vulnerability and dangerously unsophisticated instinct. Gilbert's essay extends the structuralist-sociological model of Landy (1972) who looks at the characters of Paradise Lost in terms of the traditional, Western, family. Christ is the decent, conventional sibling while Satan is the deviant 'son of God' who enters a pseudo-social relationship with Eve (he is in a general sense her 'seducer' in Book IX), which in turn results in the perpetration of Satanesque deviance in Eve's seduction of Adam and the creation of humanity (Newlyn, 1993).

The fact that the voice of male authority is unattended by a physical presence, and is by implication timeless and transcendent, while her own self-image is that of an attractive, silent object prefigures, so Froula argues, an entire tradition involving the patriarchal governance of language, with the female as the silent subject (Le Comte, 1978). She closes the essay with a citation of the famous passage in Book III (40-55) [101 -2], where Milton himself reflects upon his own blindness as perversely beneficial, allowing him undistracted access to 'Celestial light' (Newlyn, 1993), the inspiration for the poem. Milton, being male, would of course regard this as his destiny.

Aers and Hodge (1981) conduct a survey of Milton's treatment of gender and marriage, both in Paradise Lost and in his prose pamphlets, particularly the divorce tracts. Their method is unprecedented because they combine a feminist agenda, which they do not unquestioningly endorse, with a Marxist perspective [174 -82]. They begin by noting that the modern 'neo Christian' critical school (Nyquist, 1999) is cautiously selective both in its eulogizing of Milton as a bedrock of the old orthodoxies of religious belief and in its implicit support of his related endorsement of the pre-twentieth-century gender roles. They argue that the neo-Christians are wrong on both counts; that Milton continually questioned Christian doctrine and here they praise Empson, including its theological paradigms of male and female. They argue that on the one hand he endorsed 'a revolutionary political and religious life which is also sexually radical' but that 'nor should we ignore Milton's inevitable complicity with orthodox sexist ideology… there are limits to how far even a heroic individual can transcend his background and education, in thought and practice' (Aers and Hodge 1981:84). Here, their Marxist methodology comes into play because they argue that Milton was subject to the ideological confusion that surrounded the immense transformations and dynamic tensions of seventeenth-century politics and culture - in Marxist terms the dialectic of historical change (Newlyn, 1993; Le Comte, 1978). His intellectual, indeed his subjective, engagements with issues such as Christian orthodoxy and gender were continually prey to an ever-changing socio-political foundation. Their argument is convincingly substantiated by their citations from Milton's writing (Newlyn, 1993). In Paradise Lost for example Milton seems to be uncertain of his own state of mind.

Comus, as Le Comte and many others point out, can be perceived as a rehearsal for Paradise Lost, particularly the Book IX exchanges between Eve and Satan [ 112 -14]. Most feminist readers perceive Satan as the archetypal male, with the temptation scene carrying obvious overtones of seduction. The question which Le Comte prompts, but does not explicitly address, is why feminist critics have not given more attention to the Lady of Comus within their treatment of Milton's gendered archetypes.

She is a version of Eve, the parallels are obvious, but at the same time she is the most powerful moral, intellectual and reflectively self-assured figure in the masque. Continually she undermines Comus's rhetorical strategies with transparent logic and unadorned individuality (Le Comte, 1978). Doing so she also undermines a literary convention, that of the male speaker and silent female addressee of the Metaphysical lyric: Donne's 'The Flea' and 'The Exstasie' and Marvell's 'The Garden' are the most prominent examples. She answers back, pro-actively, challenging the language-based core of Comus's self-assumed dominance [72 -4]. Interestingly, the feminist critics, Gilbert particularly, focus upon literary language as a gender-biased ideological discourse enshrining male dominance, but they do not give space to Comus.

Feminist theories of Milton cover a vast range of issues. Historical context is important, given that Milton's engagements with gender in his writing have to be considered in relation to the seventeenth century, male-dominated perception of woman as an honored sub-species, as much desired and feared as listened or spoken to (Nyquist, 1999). Just as significant is the fact that while the gender of the reader will not alter the words on the page, it will seriously affect their discursive and personally registered understanding of them. In the end, however, the debate centers upon Eve, specifically her first words in Book IV and her exchange with Satan in Book IX, and the prevailing questions are these: How and for what reason does Milton alter scripture? Does he create Eve as an embodied justification for personal, male and therefore hegemonic standardizations of womankind: the original woman, instinctive, intellectually active and vulnerable, unpredictable and, as Genesis proved, dangerous? (Newlyn, 1993) Or does he presents her as almost heroic: far more an individual than Adam, more imaginative and therefore the easiest, most tragically inclined target for Satan's destructive machinations?

Three lines from Book IX centralize these issues. Eve, as much to herself as in reply to Satan, states 'What fear I then, rather what know to fear/Under this ignorance of Good or Evil,/Of God or death, of law or penalty?' (PL, IX: 773-5). Economically, just prior to the Fall, she addresses all of the questions that would attend the consequences of the Fall, questions which carry over into the existential plight of non-believers: what do I know, what can I know, of the best and the worst of experience, and what of their consequences in this life or thereafter? Surely, these are ungendered, human questions, and the other question of why Milton, in a poem which addresses the state of humanity, should give them to a woman raises even more - unanswered as yet by the feminists or anyone else (Le Comte, 1978).

The Divorce pamphlet was well planned and intended as another element of his program of political and religious ideas. Divorce had been legalized for entirely selfish reasons by Henry VIII - it was indeed a contributory factor in his break with Rome - but over the subsequent century it had rarely been made use of by anyone else (Nyquist, 1999). It involved complex, potentially humiliating, and enormously expensive legal procedures. Milton's pamphlet was, as he made clear, designed as a cure for unhappiness; a proposal that couples who found… READ MORE

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