Performing Valor, Redeeming Virtue
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 5-2-2018 Performing Valor, Redeeming Virtue Karen Dodson Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Dodson, Karen, "Performing Valor, Redeeming Virtue." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2018. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/194 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 PERFORMING VALOR, REDEEMING VIRTUE by KAREN DODSON Under the Direction of Malinda Snow, PhD ABSTRACT John Milton dedicated his life to forming a path to virtue for men to follow that included education, contemplation, divine illumination, and right reason. Milton promises that his path will lead others to a life of reason and a paradise within. Eighteenth-century women responded to Milton’s formula for virtue and appropriated his path for their own enlightenment. This project examines the way in which three eighteenth-century women, Mary Astell, Lady Mary Chudleigh, and Elizabeth Carter, incorporated Milton’s path to virtue into their writing and into their lives to redefine virtue for women. INDEX WORDS: Milton, Contemplation, Right reason, Virtue, Eighteenth Century, Women PERFORMING VALOR, REDEEMING VIRTUE by KAREN DODSON A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2018 Copyright by Karen Dodson 2018 PERFORMING VALOR, REDEEMING VIRTUE by KAREN DODSON Committee Chair: Malinda Snow Commented [WU1]: Only the first and last name of your committee members should be listed here. Please do not include their titles. In other words, do not list “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” here. Committee: Paul Schmidt Paul Voss Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2018 iv DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my family, who never let me give up on my dreams. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you, Dr. Snow, for guiding me and believing in me. Thank you, Drs. Schmidt and Voss for your assistance and support. Thank you to my friends and colleagues at the University of North Georgia for a thousand words of encouragement. And, thank you God, for my sobriety and for allowing me to live to finish. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Commented [WU2]: Do not delete the table of contents. This table of contents is already formatted. Instead, you will update your headings in the document and then right click the table of contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................ V and select “update field”. Then, you will select “entire table”. 1 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 1 2 CHAPTER ONE: MILTON’S PATH TO VIRTUE ........................................... 13 1.1 Contemplation ................................................................................................. 14 1.2 Reason and Choice .......................................................................................... 17 1.3 Milton’s Eve and Reason ................................................................................ 26 1.4 Redeeming Virtue ........................................................................................... 42 3 CHAPTER TWO – MARY ASTELL AND THE “HAPPY RETREAT” ......... 52 1.5 Stoicism and Happiness .................................................................................. 58 1.6 Milton’s Influence ........................................................................................... 62 1.7 The Noise of Folly............................................................................................ 65 1.8 A Marriage of True Minds ............................................................................. 69 1.9 Contemplation ................................................................................................. 75 1.10 Reason and Choice .......................................................................................... 82 1.11 Performing Valor ............................................................................................ 85 4 CHAPTER THREE – VALUE AND VIRTUE: LADY MARY CHUDLEIGH’S LIFE SERMON ........................................................................................................................... 89 1.12 Stoicism and Forbearance .............................................................................. 95 1.13 Milton’s Influence ........................................................................................... 97 vii 1.14 Marriage, not Slavery ................................................................................... 103 1.15 Contemplation ............................................................................................... 112 1.16 Reason and Choice ........................................................................................ 119 1.17 Performing Valor .......................................................................................... 121 5 CHAPTER FOUR – ELIZABETH CARTER: REDEEMING FEMININE VALOR ................................................................................................................................. 125 1.18 The Question of Marriage ............................................................................ 131 1.19 Stoicism and Epictetus .................................................................................. 132 1.20 The Contemplative Scholar .......................................................................... 139 1.21 Virtue and Liberty ........................................................................................ 154 1.22 Performing Valor .......................................................................................... 161 6 AFTERWORD: A LEGACY OF VALOR AND VIRTUE............................... 166 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 177 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 179 1 2 INTRODUCTION As the Age of Reason dawns in the long eighteenth century, Milton’s work has a profound influence on subsequent writers, both poetically and politically. Raymond Dexter Havens provides an exhaustive representation of Milton’s influence on prosody and reception of eighteenth-century poets in The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (1961). Havens does not reveal any particular influence Milton’s theology or epistemology had on women writers, however. Furthermore, Dustin Griffin, in the introduction to Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century, asserts that Havens’ book sets out the “most comprehensive argument for Milton’s bad influence,” (1) due to the extensive and often inferior imitation of his diction and prosody. Even though Griffin provides a good deal of information about Milton’s political and poetic influence on subsequent male writers, he does not include any of the women writers in his assertions of Milton’s great attempt to recover paradise. T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom also had a great deal to say about Milton’s influence, for better or for worse, on subsequent poets. Bloom observes in his popular work The Anxiety of Influence that “the great poets of the English Renaissance are not matched by their Enlightened descendants” (10). He further suggests that “Milton may be said to have fathered the poetry that we call post-Enlightenment or Romantic, the poetry that takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death” (35). Bloom insists that by poetic influence, he does “not mean the transmission of ideas and images from earlier to later poets” (71); however, many writers who follow Milton indeed take up his “ideas” and “images” concerning the “power of the mind.” In fact, the very ideology that Milton proposes spurs many of the women writers of the eighteenth-century to emulate him. T. S. Eliot claims that “no other English poet, not Wordsworth, or Shelley, lived through or took sides in such momentous events as did Milton; of 2 no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry” (188); yet, the women who discover in Milton a shared hope of a restored human virtue faced their own political and cultural upheaval in their struggle for dignity and equality. And even though, according to Eliot, “Milton made a great epic impossible for succeeding generations” (191), many writers adopt his ideas and his images as their own. Whereas scholars of the past have noted Milton’s influence on poetry and language, I explore the powerful epistemology that Milton provides women writers of the eighteenth-century, and I establish that his ideology and the image of a restored, internal paradise answers their call for a redefinition of a virtuous humanity that includes women. Moreover, Milton’s treatment of his female characters, the Lady in A Masque at Ludlow Castle and Eve in Paradise Lost, affords subsequent writers a representation of three-dimensional women whom they may emulate. Milton’s characterizations of the Edenic