JOHN MILTON and the POETICS of SOLITUDE Christopher Koester
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JOHN MILTON AND THE POETICS OF SOLITUDE Christopher Koester Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English, Indiana University April 2015 ii Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Doctoral Committee Joan Pong Linton, Ph.D. Judith H. Anderson, Ph.D. Penelope Anderson, Ph.D. Nick Williams, Ph.D. March 3, 2015 iii Chris Koester JOHN MILTON AND THE POETICS OF SOLITUDE At a time when religion, community, and family formed the basis of society, John Milton openly advocated separation and difference, whether through divorce, through division of church and state, church disestablishment, or through his own assertions of poetic superiority and the singular ability to “justify the ways of God to men” (PL, 1.26). My five-chapter dissertation examines each of these ruptures via a concept intrinsic to all of them, the concept of solitude. Even as solitude was beginning to emerge as a positive notion and practice of individuation within early modern society, Milton was complicating it. Instead of a practice, he theorized solitude as a mode of being essential to human creatures, modeled on his God, who is “alone / From all eternity” (PL, 8.405). Different from us, God invites us to be different from each other, an invitation we answer through our individual solitudes. This emphasis on solitude opens my dissertation to readings both historical and theoretical. Historically, I situate Milton as a radical dissident, whose notion of solitude overturns an Aristotelian system based in human sociability. For Aristotle, sociability defines the human, insofar as “he who is unable to live in society [...] must be either a beast or a god” (Politics, 1130). In this way, Milton departs from the solitude-opposing philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, while also finding a kindred spirit in the writing of Lucy Hutchinson. Theoretically, I identify Milton with a line of thinkers that includes figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida. Joan Pong Linton, Ph.D. Judith H. Anderson, Ph.D. Penelope Anderson, Ph.D. Nick Williams, Ph.D. iv Table of Contents Acceptance Page ii Abstract iii Introduction: “Solitude and Difference in Milton’s Poetry and Prose” 1 Chapter 1: “‘Through Eden took their solitary way’: Solitude and Marriage in Paradise Lost” 27 Chapter 2: “Satanic Solitude in the Works of Hobbes and Milton” 56 Chapter 3: “Placing Blame: Otium and Shade in Paradise Lost” 83 Chapter 4: “Allegory and Aloneness in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes” 111 Chapter 5: “Authorizing Solitude: Lucy Hutchinson and John Milton, Dalila and Samson” 138 Endnotes 170 Works Cited 181 Curriculum Vita 1 Solitude and Difference in Milton’s Poetry and Prose In a central passage from Areopagitica, John Milton identifies a connection between reading morally ambiguous texts and living in a morally ambiguous world. Whether one is reading a written text or interpreting the text of the moral universe, Milton believes, in both cases, what “purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary” (YP 2, 515).1 Though not stated here, Milton imagines these purity-producing trials as occurring in solitude, as even a cursory glance at his poetry will serve to indicate. Moments before creating a mate for Adam, for instance, God explains that his foregoing solitude was only meant to “try” him, adding that the various creatures Adam hitherto encountered were “for trial only brought, / To see how thou couldst judge of fit and meet” (8.437-448). Similarly, when Eve desires solitude in Book 9 of the epic, Adam implores her to “trial choose / With me, best witness of thy virtue tried” (9.316-317). Upon the Son’s entrance into the desert in Paradise Regained, “the better to converse / With solitude,” Satan appears in order “to try” him (1.191; 123). “[A]lone and helpless,” the Lady of Comus will “in the happy trial most glory prove” (582, 591). Samson’s solitude at the mill also ends in a “trial” of “strength” (1643-1644). More than coincidental, Milton intentionally describes these characters as existing in solitude during times of trial. Whatever the situation, and more could be named, images of the solitary invariably precede moments of trial throughout Milton’s texts, both poetry and prose, suggesting solitude’s indispensability to his conception of Christian virtue and human freedom. Insofar as we cannot know in advance when trial will occur, however, Milton presents us with a dilemma, one that guides my research in the following chapters. Is not the ultimate trial one of grasping trials of moment amidst the struggles of everyday life—of grasping kairos in the 2 linear unfolding of chronos? Assuming solitude serves as a precondition of trial, in what sense must we always be alone, then, and thus always prepared for trial, should one happen to occur? Rather than offer a dichotomized solution to this dilemma, in which humans are either alone and prepared for trial or else together and unprepared, Milton intensifies the problem over the course of his literary career by imagining humans as simultaneously alone and together, different and alike, hierarchically separated and monistically one. This dual commitment to solitude and society appears as early as the companion poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, a literary diptych dating from sometime between 1629 and 1631. In these poems, Milton holds in balance the opposing virtues of mirth and melancholy. Not until the early 1640s, however, does the emotional equilibrium originally found in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso begin to shift, as Milton confronts growing divisions in church and state, the isolation of a failed marriage, the death of his friend, Charles Diodati, the difficulty of finding intellectual companions in England, as well as his degenerative blindness. While still committed to both solitude and society as complimentary concepts, the nature of those commitments starts to change in the face of these hardships. Increasingly, Milton writes of solitude as a permanent human condition, and companionship as a human ideal, something to be desired but perhaps never (or only partially) attainable, at least in this life.2 In 1647, for instance, Milton writes to Florentine friend and polymath, Carlo Dati, to let him know that he is “forced to live in almost perpetual solitude,” a sentiment whose adverbial qualification “almost” will drop from the equation when writing his greatest verse (YP 2, 763). If Milton’s allegiance seems divided between the goddess of mirth and “divinest Melancholy” in the L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, that indecisiveness certainly ends by the time he writes Paradise Lost, a poem which justifies to men the ways of a God “alone / From all eternity,” who, like the enshrouded personification of melancholy in Il Penseroso, 3 appears “Throned inaccessible,” except when he “shad’st / The full blaze of [his] beams” (8.405- 406; 3.377-378). This is the same God in whose image we are made, “Inward and outward both, his image fair” (8.221). His growing belief in permanent human solitude should not be taken as a sign of resignation, though. As the precondition of trial, solitude enables and even prepares a person to engage in free and virtuous action in a world in which evil always exists as a potential. Without naming it as such, Milton’s emphasis on the importance of solitude to Christian society serves as the basis for his argument against imprimatur in Areopagitica, and will continue to appear in various forms in prose tracts after it. Claiming he “cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d,” Milton deems solitary trials like those described above as necessary to the “true warfaring Christian” (YP 2, 515). This emphasis on physical exercise returns again later, where he relates how our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compar’d in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie. (YP 2, 543) If lacking in movement, truth will necessarily atrophy, according to Milton, who regards exercise performed for the body as analogous to the maintenance of faith. Without this active seeking, which must occur in solitude, a “man may be a heretick in the truth,” but for the wrong reason, holding the right information, but without testing that information for himself. In his theologically radical and posthumously published tome, Christian Doctrine, Milton summarizes 4 the necessity of Christian solitude in writing that godly truth reveals itself “only to the individual faith of each man, and demands of us that any man who wishes to be saved should work out his beliefs for himself,” and, separately, that “Every believer is entitled to interpret the scriptures; and by that I mean interpret them for himself” (YP 6, 118 and 583). His is not merely a theology sola fide, by faith alone, but also a faith in aloneness itself, an aloneness that differentiates us from each other, even as it enables us to make a difference in the world.3 Milton certainly experienced solitary trials of his own, the greatest occurring during the middle and end of his life. Writing in the Second Defense, his polemical rejoinder to Salmasius, a pro-royalist writer from the continent, he asserts that “In time of trial, I was neither cast down in spirit nor unduly fearful of envy or death” (YP 4, 552-553).