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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 76-8336 MAGLIOCCO, Maurine Marie Fisk, 1944- THE FUNCTION OF HUMOR IN THE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON. The University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 1975 Literature, English Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan48ioe © 1975 MAURINE MARIE FISK MAGLIOCCO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE THE FUNCTION OF HUMOR IN THE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY MAURINE MAGLIOCCO 1975 THE FUNCTION OF HUMOR IN THE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON APPROX :d b y DISSERTATION COMMITTEE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I should like to thank the members of my committee for their understanding and thoughtful consideration, especially David P. French for his many helpful comments and suggestions, and most especially James H. Sims for his continuous encouragement and support. Finally, I should like to acknowledge the great debt I owe to my husband, Hugo, for his patience and love throughout the writing of this dissertation. Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE................................................. V Chapter I. "GRIM LAUGHTER": THE STRATEGY OF PROSE........ 1 II. THE SATIRIC SPIRIT AND HEART-EASING MIRTH ..... 115 III. JUST DERISION AND THE JOY OF LIFE............. 194 IV. CONCLUSION..................................... 287 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................ 290 iv PREFACE Recent studies in phenomenology have verified what nonspecialists may have long suspected— that people perceive according to their expectations.^ This perhaps explains why many readers of John Milton have perceived little or no 2 humor in his works ; they have been taught to expect, and consequently they see, the sublime, the tragic, the lofty, the philosophical, and the theological, but they do not see the humor. 0£, if they do, they suspect themselves of "reading into" serious passages a frivolity or gaiety that results from a perverse mood of theirs rather than from Milton's intention. And then there are readers who come to Milton for the first time with no previous expectations or pre-established value judgments who do see humor in his works and respond with pleasure to it. Are they seeing something that is not there? I think not; humor is present, and those who, because of educational training or cultural condition­ ing, do not see it simply miss the totality of experience Milton offers. For humor is part of the complete experience of living, and humor in works of art alters our perceptions, making us see reality more fully. In fact, part of the delight we experience in humor comes from our surprise in seeing a familiar object in a new way. In verbal humor, for example, we see language being made to carry meanings and associations we would not have believed possible; thus, we may groan at puns and even agree that they are the lowest form of wit, but we still enjoy them because they have given us insight into the multiple possibilities of words— and into the ideas and situations the words represent. In fact, such verbal humor is apparent in .many comic skits popular in vaudeville acts and in movies. Sometimes that humor comes from puns and sometimes from acting out literal­ ly a phrase which is normally meant figuratively. Our sudden apprehension of both the power of language and its control by our own will evokes surprise which may result in laughter. When, for example, a man says to a crowd of noisy, talkative men, "Hold your tongues," and all the men respond by putting their hands in their mouths and grasping their tongues, we are surprised and some of us laugh. The fact that not all of us laugh brings up the difficulty in determining what is humor and what is not and brings us back to the original problem of why some people see humor in Milton and some do not. I suspect that, if put to the test, any writer, even those almost universally considered humorous, will not elicit the same response from V i everyone. But when we read certain writers we expect to be amused and we usually are— we perceive according to our expectations. Humor is allusive; it depends upon our acculturation, our surroundings, our sex, our age— even our mood of the moment— for its effect. I, for example, have laughed at a cartoon picturing a little girl holding a broom and shouting to her mother: ’’Mommy, I ’ve finished all the nooks, now what’s a cranny?” Some of my friends can never see this as funny, and even I am not always amused by it. Adding to the difficulty of defining humor is this fact that something we perceive as funny one day may not seem funny the next. Or something which seems hilarious when we are in a crowded movie theatre where everyone is laughing may not seem even slightly humorous the next evening when we go to see the movie again but only two or three people are present in the theatre with us. Our response, then, our designation of what is humorous, relates partly to such matters as what other people think is humorous, what our culture, has taught us to perceive as humor, and what immediate context we happen to be in when the humor confronts us. Complicating the already complicated situation, moreover, is the additional fact that even though we all usually respond to what our culture designates as humor we are still individuals who think and imagine differently from vii each other. Humor is personal. Some of us enjoy puns and word play, some the satirical exposure of folly, while others react more to wit that stimulates pleasurable imagination. Milton offers the whole range of humor. Puns and mockery abound in his prose, in many of his satiric poems, and in his portraits of Satan and his cohorts ; his imaginative wit is most apparent in his playful descriptions of nature and in the delightful urbanity of some of his dialogues. He constantly, then, appeals directly to the organizing faculty, to reason, and also, sometimes simultaneously, to the picture-making faculty, to the imagination. We might enjoy these appeals to our sense of humor and yet not always laugh at them. Among those who have written about comedy, some disagreement exists as to the necessary relationship between comedy and laughter. In his essay on laughter, Henri Bergson almost totally identifies the two, seeming to argue that comedy does not exist unless O it results in laughter. L. J. Potts agrees that "laughter has something to do with comedy" but he cautions, "it is very doubtful whether the end of comedy is to produce laughter."^ His position is that laughter is a physical response with its source not in drama or literature, but in what convention dictates as funny. When not laughing at the conventional, he says, we laugh when we are embarrassed, when we are terrified, or when we are under the influence v i i i of sudden grief. Thus, according to Potts, the presence of laughter does not indicate that something is comic and comedy does not always produce laughter.^ If comedy does not always produce laughter, humor certainly does not. In general, the distinction I make between comedy and humor is simply that comedy is humor expanded and crystallised into art. Comedy is an art form, comprised of various parts, most of which are humorous. Humor is much lighter and much more delicate than comedy. It is not necessarily funny; it can simply be delightful, pleasant, and playful, evoking an occasional smile rather than hilarious laughter. At one point in Paradise Lost, Adam says to Eve that ’’smiles from Reason flow / To brute deni’d” (IX, 239-40).® Unlike the laughter which Potts calls a physical response, smiles come from an engagement of the mind, our ability to smile setting us apart from animals.