MILTON AND GENDER

Milton’s contempt for women has been accepted since Samuel Johnson’s famous Life of the poet. Subsequent critics have long debated whether Milton’s writings were anti- or pro-feminine, a problem further complicated by his advocacy of "divorce on demand" for men. Milton and Gender reevaluates the charge that Milton was antifeminine, pointing out that he was not seen that way by contemporaries, but espoused startlingly modern ideas of marriage and the relations between the sexes. The first two sections of specially commissioned essays in this volume investigate the representations of gender and sexuality in Milton’s prose and verse. In the final section, the responses of female readers ranging from George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to lesser-known artists and revolutionaries are brought to bear on Milton’s afterlife and reputation. Together, these essays provide a thoroughly new perspective on the contested issues of femininity and masculinity, marriage and divorce in Milton’s work.

CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN is Professor of English Literature at the University of Memphis. She is the author of The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Tradition (1998).

MILTON AND GENDER

EDITED BY
CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, CB2 2RU, UK
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011–4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia
Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Milton and gender / edited by Catherine Gimelli Martin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 84130 5
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Political and social views. 2. Feminism and literature – England – History – 17th century. 3. Women and literature – England – History – 17th century. 4. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Relations with women. 5. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Characters – Women. 6. Sex role in literature. 7. Women in literature. I. Martin, Catherine Gimelli.
PR3592.F45M7 2004
821′.4 – dc22 2004051860

ISBN 0 521 84130 5 hardback

Contents

Illustrations

Notes on contributors

AMY BOESKY is an Associate Professor of English at Boston College, Massachusetts. She is the author of Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England, and has published articles on Milton and other subjects in Texas Studies in Language and Literature (TSLL), English Literary History (ELH), Milton Studies, and Modern Philology. She is currently writing a book on time, technology, and the body in early modern England.

WENDY FURMAN-ADAMS is Professor of English at Whittier College, California. Her publications – many written collaboratively with Virginia Tufte – have dealt mainly with Paradise Lost as an illustrated poem and have appeared in such venues as Milton Studies, Milton Quarterly, and Huntington Library Quarterly. She also co-edited Renaissance Readings: Intertext and Context (with Maryanne Cline Horowitz), and Riven Unities: Authority and Experience, Self and Other in Milton’s Poetry (with William Shullenberger). Her chapter in this volume is part of an ongoing collaborative book-length study, tentatively entitled “Re-visions: Women Artists Reading Milton.”

MARSHALL GROSSMAN is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of The Story of all Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry and “Authors to Themselves”: Milton and the Revelation of History, and editor of Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon. His current projects are The Seventeenth Century, for the Blackwell Guide to English Literature series, and an edited collection of essays on reading and ethics in the Renaissance.

ACHSAH GUIBBORY is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The author of numerous articles on seventeenth-century literature as well as The Map of Time and Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England, she is writing a book on the uses of Judaism in seventeenth-century England and editing The Cambridge Companion to John Donne.

DAYTON HASKIN, Professor of English at Boston College, Massachusetts, is the author of Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Pennsylvania, 1994). He has written several essays on Milton and gender, including “Choosing the Better Part with Mary and with Ruth,” in the collection called Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World. A member of the Advisory Board for The Variorum Edition of John Donne, he has been working on the ways in which Donne is lodged in the literary history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

GINA HAUSKNECHT is an Associate Professor of English at Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she teaches British Reniassance literature and gender studies. Her work on early modern masculinity includes a recent Huntington Library Quarterly article on husbands in Stuart marriage advice literature. She also has published in areas far afield from Milton: girls in contemporary popular culture, pedagogy, and technology, and Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation in central Europe and elsewhere.

LISA LOW is a Milton and Woolf scholar. She has published a number of articles on Virginia Woolf and is co-editor with Anthony Harding of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism.

CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN is the author of The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention, and the recipient of the Milton Society’s James Holly Hanford Award (1999). She has also published numerous essays on Milton, Donne, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Bacon, often in conjunction with early modern science and philosophy. She is currently co-editing a volume commemorating the quadracentennial of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning: Advancement 2005. Two completed book manuscripts are forthcoming: “Milton among the Puritans” and “Proteus Unbound: The Poetics of the Baconian revolution.” She is a Professor of English at the University of Memphis and a 2003–2004 Francis Bacon Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library.

JOHN ROGERS teaches English at Yale University. The author of The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton, as well as other studies of seventeenth-century literary and cultural topics, Rogers is currently writing a book about Milton’s failure to write about the crucifixion, which examines the poet’s literary and theological work in the context of early modern antitrinitarianism. The book is tentatively entitled “Milton’s Passion.”

ELIZABETH M. SAUER is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada, where she holds a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. She has authored Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton’s Epics and has just completed Paper-protestations and Textual Communities in England. She has also edited the following books: Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations 1500–1900, co-edited with Balachandra Rajan; Reading Early Modern Women, co-edited with Helen Ostovich; Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, co-edited with Jennifer Andersen; Literature and Religion in Early Modern England, co-edited with Jennifer Andersen (special issue of Renaissance and Reformation); Milton and the Imperial Vision, co-edited with Balachandra Rajan, and winner of the Milton Society of America Irene Samuel Award; and Agonistics: Arenas of Creative Contest, co-edited with Janet Lungstrum. Sauer has published in such journals as Milton Studies and Prose Studies, and was recently awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Canada Council Grant (2003–6) to complete “Toleration and Milton’s ‘Peculiar’ Nation.” “Osiris and Urania: Milton and the Climates of Reading,” edited by her, is in submission.

WILLIAM SHULLENBERGER is the Joseph Campbell Chair in the Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York. He has published miscellaneous poetry, as well as essays in various collections and journals on Milton, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan, Wordsworth, Keats, and Dickinson, and has co-authored, with Bonnie Shullenberger, Africa Time: Two Scholars’ Season in Uganda.

RACHEL TRUBOWITZ is Associate Professor at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. She has published essays on a variety of early modern topics. Her most recent publication is “Sublime/Pauline: Denying Death in Paradise Lost,” in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth J. Ballamy, Patrick G. Cheney, and Michael C. Schoenfeldt.

VIRGINIA JAMES TUFTE is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. Her publications include The Grammar of Style, The Poetry of Marriage, and Changing Images of the Family, in addition to her numerous articles on Milton (most, though not all, co-authored with Wendy Furman-Adams). She has written and produced a video-biography of Carlotta Petrina, who illustrated Paradise Lost in 1937. Tufte and Furman-Adams are working on a book-length study, “Re-Vision: Women Artists Reading Milton.”

JAMES GRANTHAM TURNER teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and has authored four books: The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–60; One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton; Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685; Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–1685. He also co-edited, with David Loewenstein, Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. His keynote address to the Milton Society of America, “Elisions and Erasures,” appeared in Milton Quarterly 30 (1996).

Acknowledgments

This volume has profited from the helpful advice and encouragement of Joan Bennett, Stella Revard, David Loewenstein, and Victoria Kahn, who either suggested potential contributors or cogent revisions of the introductory chapter, or simply supplied much needed green flags at crucial junctures. Special thanks also go to Nigel Smith and Graham Parry, who organized the 1998 International Milton Symposium in York, England, where the core chapters of this volume were assembled. Not only the authors of these chapters – Amy Boesky, Dayton Haskin, Gina Hauskneckt, and Rachel Trubowitz – but all of the subsequent contributors should also be thanked for their exceptional willingness to expand and revise their essays to fit the special requirements of this volume. Without exception, the collaborative process proved a richly rewarding and truly educational experience. And because the project was conducted with minimal institutional support, the internal support of my closest scholarly friends and relatives has been more invaluable than I can possibly say. In that category, William Shullenberger, Julie Solomon, Marshall Grossman, Wendy Furman-Adams, and Richard Martin stand out for reasons that they alone know best.

Abbreviations

References to the prose works are given by volume and page number, references to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are given by book and line numbers. Unless otherwise noted, Milton’s poetry is cited from Merritt Y. Hughes, John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957).