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Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Sandra M. Gilbert
Sandra M. Gilbert*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Abstract

Because the myth of origins that Milton articulates in Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, literary women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf have recorded anxieties about his paradigmatic patriarchal poetry. To these readers, the principal story that Milton seems to tell is the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also the garden of poetry. Parallels and doublings implicit in this story, moreover, link Eve, the archetypal woman, with the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death. For female readers sensitive to such implications, Milton may be what Harold Bloom defines as a “great Inhibitor.” From Wollstonecraft to Woolf, however, women writers have allayed anxieties aroused by this poet, whom Woolf called “the first of the masculinists,” by rereading, misreading, and reinterpreting Paradise Lost.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 368 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Bee Time Vine (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953), p. 263.

2 The Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlman, Vol. ii, 1934-1939 (New York: Swallow-Harcourt, 1967), p. 233.

3 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1929), p. 118.

4 On p. 7 of A Room Woolf recounts an incident involving the manuscript of “Lycidas.” On p. 39 she refers to “the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration.”

5 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 35. The OED, incidentally, gives three meanings for the word “bogey” or “bogy,” all relevant here: “1. As quasi-proper name: the evil one, the devil. 2. A bogle or goblin; a person much dreaded. 3. fig. An object of terror or dread; a bugbear.”

6 Susan Gubar and I examine the revisionary elements of most of these works in detail in our book, forthcoming from Yale Univ. Press in 1979, The Madwoman in the Attic: Nineteenth-Century Literature by Women. I should like to note here my deep indebtedness to Gubar's thinking on these subjects. Many of the ideas expressed in this essay are as much hers as mine, though any inadequacies in their formulation here are entirely my own.

7 Albert Gelpi, Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), p. 40. Commenting upon Dickinson's girlhood rebelliousness, Gelpi adds that “As with Byron, too, her combativeness cast her in the role of the devil; she told Abiah: ‘I have come from ”to and fro, and walking up, and down“ the same place that Satan hailed from, when God asked him where he'd been …‘ Neither she nor Byron could escape the sense that the thrust of the will, however magnificent, was not only foolhardy but demonic …” (p. 41).

8 This question has most recently been debated in Milton Studies by Marcia Landy and Barbara K. Lewalski, both of whom are concerned solely with Milton's own intentions and assertions regarding women (whereas I am just as interested in the implications of Milton's ideas for women). See Marcia Landy, “Kinship and the Role of Women in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies, 4 (1972), 3-18, and Barbara K. Lewalski, “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” Milton Studies, 6 (1974), 3-20.

9 Woolf, A Writer's Diary (New York: Harcourt, 1954), pp. 5-6. Read in isolation, this passage may strike some as an example of Woolfian irony, but in the context of the diary it is quite a straightforward expression of Woolf's thoughts and feelings about Milton.

10 The Voyage Out (New York: Harcourt, 1920), p. 326.

11 “Influence is Influenza—an astral disease” (Bloom, p. 95).

12 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, Haworth Ed. (New York: Harper, 1900), p. 328.

13 Northrop Frye discusses the relationship between Eve as representative female and “the myth of a great mother-goddess from whom all deified principles in nature have ultimately descended, even though their fathers are fallen angels,” thus hinting at the connection linking the “Earth-born” Titans, Eve, and—as we shall see—Satan. As Frye notes, however, this relationship, which Brontë makes explicit, is only implicit in Milton, whose patriarchal cosmology necessitates the subordination of the “mother-goddess” Nature. See Northrop Frye, “The Revelation to Eve,” in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), esp. pp. 20-24, 46-47.

14 Paradise Lost viii.538-39. Hereafter quotations identified parenthetically in the text only by book and line numbers are from Paradise Lost.

15 William Blake, Milton, Bk. ii, Pl. 39, ll. 40-42.

16 See Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), pp. 249-53.

17 See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952), esp. Ch. xvii, “The Mother.”

18 Susan Gubar discusses these literary parallels among Eve, Sin, Error, Duessa, and other, later figures in greater detail in her “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire,” Signs (Winter 1978).

19 See “On the Character of Milton's Eve,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1930-34), iv, 105-11.

20 Of course the negative trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death parodies the “official” Holy Trinity of God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. But, as Paradise Lost is structured, Adam does seem to participate in another, patriarchal trinity along with God and Christ, while Eve belongs metaphorically to a trinity with Satan and Sin.

21 (New York: Creative Age, 1948), p. 384.

22 Bk. i, Pl. 2, ll. 19-20. Joseph Wittreich notes that “Ololon is the spiritual form of Milton's sixfold emanation, the truth underlying his errors about women. Milton's three wives and three daughters—all of whom, according to Blake, Milton treated abusively—constitute his emanation” (Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ed., The Romantics on Milton [Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970], p. 99). Discussing Blake's view of Milton, Northrop Frye observes that “one is struck by the fact that Milton never sees beyond this sinister ‘female will.’ His vision of women takes in only the hostility and fear which it is quite right to assume toward the temptress …but which is by no means the only way in which women can be visualized” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake [Boston: Beacon, 1962], p. 352). Along the same lines, Wittreich also comments in his recent Angel of Apocalypse that “Blake's point [in Milton] is [that] …because Milton exhibits contempt for this world, precisely because he donned the robes of chastity, holding his soul distinct from his body, he remained isolated, for most of his life, from the divine vision….” However, “Milton's doctrine of chastity, which had oppressed him, his wives, and his daughters, is, in his moment of triumph, overcome, Milton annihilating the tyranny of the law (Urizen), one of whose tyrannies is ‘the Chain of Jealousy’ that binds Orc” (Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of Milton [Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975], pp. 37, 247).

23 See Shelley, Prometheus Unbound iii.1, 57, and Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto i, st. 6.

24 In this connection, Frye relates the explosive imagery of Eve's dream flight both to the volcanic rebelliousness of the enchained Titans and to the Gunpowder Plot. See Tercentenary Tribute, p. 24.

25 Byron, letter to Moore, 19 Sept. 1821, quoted in Byron: Selected Works, ed. Edward E. Bostetter (New York: Holt, 1972), p. 285, ed. n.

26 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 25, n.

27 “Snake,” The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking, 1964), i, 349-51.

28 Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 19. See also Susan Gubar, “The Genesis of Hunger, according to Shirley,” Feminist Studies, 3 (Spring-Summer 1976), 5-21, for a more detailed discussion of this point.

29 Review of Jane Eyre, Quarterly Review, 84 (Dec. 1848), 173-74.

30 Letter of 27 Aug. 1850, quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857; rpt. New York: Everyman, 1974), p. 313.

31 W. B. Yeats, “The Cold Heaven,” Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 122-23.

32 “Daddy,” Ariel (New York: Harper, 1966), pp. 50-51.

33 Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957), ii, 591.

34 Helene Moglen, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 32.

35 See “The Introduction,” The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 4-6, esp. ll. 9-18 (“Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, / Such an intruder on the rights of men, / Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem'd, / The fault can by no vertue be redeem'd …”) and ll. 51-64 (“How are we fal'n, fal'n by mistaken rules? …”).

36 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 24 Sept. 1819, quoted in Wittreich, Romantics on Milton, p. 562.

37 See also George Eliot, Middlemarch, Bk. i, Ch. vii, for an illuminating analysis of Dorothea's identification of masculinity, Milton, Latin and Greek, wisdom, and power (“…it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly”).

38 See Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry.”