Chapter 6 - Milton's Eve and Marvell's Maria Fairfax: Wives and Daughters in the Pastoral Family Circle

Summary

The last two authors discussed in this study revisit the figure of the pastoral romance heroine toward the close of the English Renaissance. Eve, humanity's mother in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), presides over the locus amoenus of Eden but nonetheless rejects her generic casting in favor of adventure and intellectual risk, while General Fairfax's young daughter Maria in Marvell's Upon Appleton House (ca. 1652) reverses Eve's effect on nature and mankind with her magical ability to stop time and fix nature. Eve and Maria engage in reflective solipsism with vastly different ethical results. While Eve falls to the temptation of becoming the platonic object of contemplation, Maria domesticates nature through the power of her reforming subjective vision. She is the observer, not the observed; her vision rivals and supplants the poet's own, creating a paradise of the mind that compensates for the loss of Eden.

A common thread throughout the examples of pastoral romance discussed in this study is the prominence of Neoplatonic love philosophy in the elevation of female beauty as a virtue. The pastoral romance heroine, in her ability to inspire loves both earthly and divine, fulfills a long list of dynastic, religious and ethical imperatives in an increasingly bourgeois society, while in the process offering a humanist model of virtue which provides a metaphor for simple chastity in the service of larger ideals. Sometimes, her beauty is a moral force for others but not for herself, as in the case of Pastorella in The Faerie Queene. In the figures of Eve and Maria Fairfax, however, Milton and Marvell examine the moral effect that the pastoral heroine's beauty has on herself. Kathleen Kelly, in her discussion of how Milton and Marvell each employ the myth of Narcissus in Paradise Lost and Upon Appleton House, argues that together these late Renaissance poets “disenchanted” the love lyric by discrediting Platonic claims for the improving nature of love itself. By submitting the rapture of love to the critique of reason, Kelly claims, Restoration literary representations of love differ markedly from their Renaissance predecessors in their attitude toward erotic rapture.