Milton and Gender.

Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed. Milton and Gender.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 278 pp. index. illus. $75. ISBN: 0-521-84130-5.

The 1999 International Milton Symposium in York, England produced several critical collections. Among them, Graham Parry and Joad Raymond's Milton and the Terms of Liberty (2002) reflects the conference's primary focus on Milton's republicanism, while Milton and Gender derives in part from the symposium's several discussions of how gender, sexuality, reproduction, men and women, and women writers manifest themselves in Milton's work. The appearance of these two volumes suggests a split in the field--at best a polite coexistence between "mainstream" Milton studies and "feminist," or gender-based, Milton criticism--even as it makes clear that students of Milton and republicanism often draw on gender, sexuality, and women, while gender-based scholars regularly explore the interrelations between particular metaphors or allusions and larger cultural or political issues. I would suggest that the key question raised here--should gender be explored as a separate issue or is it integral to all aspects of Milton studies?--remains unresolved, that such irresolution can be fruitful, and that gender-based critics in particular need to address this irresolution to clarify their own projects and methodologies.

The helpful introduction raises these theoretical issues, though it does not entirely clarify them. Martin embraces recent critical work involving historicism, subjectivity, and gender, but her real focus is on the history of Milton's reputation (as a man writing about women and men) from the divorce tracts to the present day--how he was spurned as a licentious radical after the divorce tracts, admired by women at the Restoration, perceived from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries either as a romantic idealist or as a misogynist possessed of a "'Turkish contempt' for women" (1), understood by twentieth-century scholars of Puritanism as a proponent for spiritual equality, and reviled in the 1970s as a patriarchal "bogey" by feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (and their successors). Influential as this reception history has been, exclusive attention to it can reduce gender to the question of whether Milton was a(n) (anti)feminist, demonize Gilbert and Gubar, and leave the larger terrain of Milton and gender unmapped.

Happily, such a map emerges from Milton and Gender's fine essays and bibliographies. And a number of strong essays do not evaluate Milton but use gender as one of several tools in their historical, philosophical, and poetic analyses. James Turner's claims for the irreconcilable coexistence of "patriarchal-masculinist" and "ecstatic-egalitarian" principles in Milton's work (51) explodes and notion of being for or against the poet, clearing the way for his insight into the centrality of divorce--defined as separation, exclusion, and compensatory creation--to Milton's godly voice. Marshall Grossman explores scenes of generation in Paradise Lost to show that Milton's self-literalizing metaphors constitute a rhetorical version of the poem's foundational processes of creation--God's separating creation out of himself so it can struggle against materialist inertia (and evil) to return to him, and Adam's participation in the creation of a complementary Eve. Amy Boesky, Rachel Trubowitz, and Achsah Guibbory all explore the Hebraic content of what they see as a Christian Samson Agonistes. Boesky links images of wounding and generation to the (Jewishly) maternal and material to confirm established readings of the poem as typologically Christian. Trubowitz sets nursing metaphors in historical context both to separate Milton's drama from Puritan arguments for domestic and national purity and to align Samson with millenarian uses of Jewish physicality as raw material for a transformative Christianity. Guibbory's analysis of Samson as a man who frees himself from (Jewish) slavery, law, nation, and women to (Christian) spiritual liberty in God provides a definitive account of the Hebraic, but nonetheless anti-Semitic and Pauline, nature of Milton's work.

Other strong essays argue for Milton (as feminist) with equal sophistication and insight. Reading Milton's Masque as a defense of Reformation virginity, William Shullenberger deftly deploys Lacan to read the Lady's speech as the Word of the Father, and uses Ovid, Sandys, and Freud to read the Lady's beauty as an image of Medusa-like potency. In an essay brimming with historical material, Elizabeth Sauer reads Milton's response to the rise and fall of radical Protestant nationalism in the context of a specifically female dissent tradition. Paradise Lost is Milton's "Great Book of Sufferings," Sauer argues, in which Milton, like female dissenters, "links personal and national tragedy and develops a narrative of loss and consolation" (144), and from which Eve--and Milton--emerge as "female" prophets.

Dayton Haskin and Lisa Low show how later writers made use of the potential they saw in Milton's work. Setting George Eliot's Middlemarch in the context of nineteenth-century Parliamentary debates about marriage and divorce, Haskin links Casaubon to the misogynistic Milton of popular history and Dorothea to the actual Milton of the divorce tracts, arguing that Eliot (allied to an abandoned husband) found in Milton a writer risking censure to reveal private grievances whose published expression might further the public good. Low reads allusions to Milton's Masque in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out not as an indictment of Milton as the source of what destroys the heroine, but as an invocation of an ideal she yearns for but fails to realize. In a third essay on an artist's reworking of Milton, Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia Tufte provide a compelling account of nineteenth-century botanical drawing in general, and Jane Giraud's "ecofeminist" Paradise Lost of 1846 in particular.

The impressive range here makes this an important and provocative collection. Even those essays anxious to render Milton safe or at least consistent in the realm of gender--Gina Hausknecht's careful reading of the divorce tracts as texts that expand sex roles to gender roles that are potentially enabling for women; Martin's related analysis of Samson Agonistes as a poem in which both Samson (early) and Dalila (throughout) hide behind a false femininity that each must reject in order to undertake the responsibilities of true personhood; and John Rogers's heroic efforts to resolve the contradictions in the De Doctrina Christiana chapter devoted to the prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge and laws regarding marriage and divorce--amply repay scrutiny. The readings are rigorous and inventive, and the contradictions and paradoxes that they finally acknowledge signal the ongoing life of the 350-year-old debate about Milton and gender.

PAULA LOSCOCCO

Sarah Lawrence College