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Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth‐Century Debate Over Women

2008; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1094-348x.2008.00182.x

1094-348X

Shannon Miller,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

While debates about Milton's representation of women have assumed a significant place within Milton criticism in the last two decades, it is remarkable that there has been such slight attention to the influence of the "anti-feminist" pamphlet debate on Milton's representation of Eve, the Fall, and his ideas about gendered culpability in Paradise Lost.1 Mary Nyquist has suggested that "Milton could not but have known that questions of priority figure prominently in the Renaissance debate over 'woman' " (107), while Kari McBride and John Ulreich suggest that Milton be read "in the light of early modern treatises on the nature of women and the entire history of the querelle des femmes" (109). Yet little critical consensus exists on Milton's likely or probable exposure to the texts within this tradition, a debate very active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries if less popular by the time Paradise Lost is published.2 Nor have either Nyquist or McBride and Ulreich suggested that Milton was an active interlocutor of this tradition. And yet, Milton's poem appears deeply steeped in the terms of this debate, especially questions of women's secondariness, Eve's motivations for the Fall, and of course the character of women.3 Given the critical caution about whether this body of texts was drawn into a conversation with Paradise Lost, this essay's central claim may appear bold: the seventeenth-century "anti-feminist" debates, particularly the exchange between Joseph Swetnam and three women pamphleteers who respond (Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda) produce arguments for and against the culpability of women that Milton dramatizes within Paradise Lost. Such an assertion lacks the smoking gun that would clinch such a claim: a copy of Rachel Speght'sMouzell for Melastomus in Milton's library, for example. Yet we have every reason to conclude that Milton would have been among a community of readers of these or similar tracts: himself an author engaged in the Smectymnuus debate in the early 1640s, Milton was an avid reader of a huge range of texts, as well as a participant within print-mediated debates of the period. Milton also was fully located within what Robert Darnton has called the communication circuit of the "anti-feminist" tracts. Marching about amid the booksellers's stalls in the 1630s, Milton details in a letter to Alexander Gill, Jr., that Gill is to "look for me (God willing) in London on Monday, among the booksellers" (Milton, Familiar 12-13). The shop owned by Matthew Simmons, which Sabrina Baron claims Milton would have known well, was located in Aldersgate; it was on the other side of Christ's Church from the very "Saracen's Head" where copies of Joseph Swetnam's"Arraignment" were reprinted in both 1634 and 1637.4 A revolution of printing and of reprinting framed Milton's world, and Milton was fully a member of this world, both as a reader and as a participant.5 Milton, then, had every opportunity to engage and access the world of pamphlet production in the early and mid-century, a world that continued to generate texts imbued with shifting gender ideologies. The representations of women and the use of the narrative of the Garden of Eden and the Fall within this tradition are very popular early in the century; these strategies of representation will become redirected during the Civil War and Interregnum years, thus remaining available to readers and producers of pamphlets at mid-century. This redeployment of the earlier debate thus carries within it traces of the gender debates from the 1610s and 1620s. Milton would not have had to pick up copies of Speght's or Sowernam's responses to Swetnam in order to engage aspects of this tradition. And yet, the unique innovations introduced into the "anti-feminist" debate in the early seventeenth century do appear to shape Milton's choices in Paradise Lost. A consideration of Milton's possible access to, in conjunction with the history of, this pamphlet tradition can broaden the cultural context through which we evaluate his representations of women and of gender in his epic. This essay will first illustrate the unique turn that this earlier seventeenth-century pamphlet debate took, one employed by all of the female-pseudonamed responders to Joseph Swetnam: these writers, two who certainly were women and all identifying themselves as women, reconfigure aspects of the "anti-feminist" debate through their retellings of the story of the Fall.6 Next, it will contextualize aspects of Paradise Lost amidst these early seventeenth-century "anti-feminist" defenses that reenacted the story of Eve and the Fall. Because of the centrality of the Genesis tale to defenses of women, these writings share much with a Genesis epic like Milton's Paradise Lost. Yet these specific tracts, which continue the querelle des femmes tradition, introduce rhetorical and narrative innovations to the story of Genesis. Specific characteristics of the writings of Rachel Speght and Esther Sowernam, especially their association of Eve with the female defender herself, become central elements in Milton's portrait of Eve. But Milton is not simply dramatizing the qualities that are attributed to Adam and to Eve within these debates: he actually enacts these disagreements within conversations between Adam and Eve and Adam and Raphael. Plotted along many of the same lines as the "anti-feminist" debate, Paradise Lost chooses to employ this genre in a dramatized form. This debate over the role and identity of Eve figures centrally in the arguments between Adam and Eve in Books 9 and 10. While Eve will turn at the end of Book 9 to many of the arguments and language embedded into the "anti-feminist" tracts, in Book 10 the poem will offer a seeming reconciliation to this swirling debate from the early seventeenth century. The larger context of the "anti-feminist" debate of the early seventeenth century thus provides us a way to interpret Adam's diatribe against Eve, often seen as a moment of character failing in him.7 Milton turns to this genre—and to the tradition of ideas about women contained within it—in order to transform the contested nature of the debate forum into a singular vision of the relationship between the sexes. And yet, the appearance of a stock, "anti-feminist" discourse in Book 10 of Paradise Lost also highlights the socially created identity—if also the effectiveness—of this form. Dramatically presented as a necessity for Eve to concede to this discourse in Book 10, the poem records the effectiveness of "anti-feminist" rhetoric while exposing its constructedness. The social and political implications of these tracts thus provide a framework for examining the language of "anti-feminist" attacks and defenses and Milton's use of this "debate" in his poem. One significant implication of Paradise Lost's seeming use of the "anti-feminist" scene is the silencing of the female interlocutor who had emerged onto the scene of the "anti-feminist" debate in the early seventeenth century. But, while Milton may represent the convention of silencing Eve, at least within male authored texts in the "anti-feminist" tradition, he embeds into his poem the very defenses for women promulgated by male- and female-authored tracts alike. While the direction of this argument appears to agree with the large number of feminist critics arguing for the misogyny implicit within Milton's poem,8 the very debate form Milton adapts to Paradise Lost challenges such readings: earlier modes of defending women remain in traces within the poem. As a result, Milton's attempt to stabilize these discourses cannot fully dampen the conflicting positions represented within the earlier debate forum. The result is the very doubledness of the poem, a characteristic that has allowed critics to argue contradictory positions about the representation of women in Paradise Lost. The poem's polyvocal nature is due in part to its engaging the gender debate recorded in the querelle des femmes, a debate transformed in the early seventeenth century by women's entrance into the fray.9 The phrase "anti-feminist debate" has been employed so far in this essay to describe the English tradition of texts arguing for and against the qualities of women. And yet this phrase contains a certain historical inaccuracy. As Linda Woodbridge has suggested, the mid- to late-sixteenth century querelle des femmes in England was actually not structured along the lines of a debate. Defenses were their own form and were not prompted by attacks on women. Further, the conventional arguments for and against women were often employed by the same writer: The Scholehouse of Women and its response Mulierum Paean, the first an attack, the second a defense, were both penned by Edward Gosynhill.10 Instead of any genuine debate, then, many attacks and defenses were staging a debate since they were written by the same author. In the seventeenth century, the structure of an actual publishing debate finally emerges. The publication of Joseph Swetnam's very popular The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, prompted five responses—all defenses. Three of these were published by women or under a female name. The reactive nature of the texts produced by, especially, Rachel Speght and Ester Sowernam thus gives the name "debate" validity. This structure, in which respondents specifically generate a defense to Swetnam's published attack, had not been a driving force for publication previous to 1617 (Woodbridge 104). As these shifts in the publishing tradition suggest, when women—as Speght definitely was and Sowernam could possibly have been—enter into the fray, their responses, although partaking of many conventions from earlier tracts, become quite serious—in contradistinction to the playful tone of earlier defenses. Whether produced by "material" women, such as Speght, or by men taking on the pseudonym of a woman, this assumption of a female identity in print shifts the character of these discourses. In some cases, an overt level of sincerity emerges within a tract: Rachel Speght means to offer a defense to the "filthie froth""foamed" onto "Eves sex" within Swetnam's attack (Polemics 243). In a complementary fashion, the tropes or forms of argumentation employed by these writers shift as a result of self-identifying as female defenders. While the name Ester Sowernam is almost certainly a pseudonym, the specifics within "her" tract become distinct because of the assertion of a female identity. While there has been some debate about Sowernam's biological identity, this essay considers her a woman and argues that the female author position effects similar problems for a writer regardless of biological sexual identity. Thus, such an adoption of an identity in print, either because it accords with one's sex or not, results in the reconfiguration of certain familiar conventions of the genre. As with tracts before 1617, the responses by Speght, Sowernam, and Munda invoke the Genesis account of the Fall, as well as an extensive range of biblical narratives. Yet the proportion of their tracts that turns to the story of Adam and Eve becomes significantly higher than either Joseph Swetnam's attack on women (which includes four references to Eve), or other male-authored defenses of women.11 In both Speght and Sowernam's tracts, the result becomes the narrative of the Fall operating as the first line of defense in protecting women from the attacks of Swetnam and others. While most scholarship on these defenses by women has focused on the arguments of writers like Speght or Sowernam, or on their play with conventional rhetoric, no critic has highlighted the two-fold use of the Fall story these writers deploy as a defense. The defenses spend a much higher percentage of time on the narrative of the Fall, utilizing an expanded account of "our first disobedience" to restage aspects of the Fall. These writers understand the structural challenge embedded within a female-authored defense. Women are described as seducers within the tracts attacking women. Thus, in defenses where women are arguing for themselves (or appear to be doing so), they could be viewed as taking on the identity of a seducing Eve. Eve's arguments had, of course, seduced Adam to fall; consequently, women defenders could be aligned with Eve. Instead, these writers turn this liability to an advantage, appropriating the potential association with the first mother. Speght and Sowernam use, even embrace, the identity of Eve in their texts. Their reasons for adopting this role may in fact have been to address the association directly: they could be, disparagingly, viewed as disputing Eves, women attempting to gain forgiveness for their own sins in order to prompt male acceptance of their acts: the consequence would be to generate sin once again. Yet, by aligning themselves with the figure of the postlapsarian Eve—and not a Mary figure—writers like Speght and Sowernam defend women's characters as well as justifying their own entrance into print. Barbara Lewalski has suggested that Speght "interprets [the querelle des femmes texts] in such a way as to deny any real basis for gender hierarchy in female nature itself" (165). Both Speght and Sowernam accomplish this through their portrait of Eve: by entering back into a (prelapsarian) garden space, their Eve-like figure can operate outside of the gender hierarchy uttered after the Fall. Consequently, their version of the defense audibly challenges the social and political implications of gender hierarchy, a subject that Milton responds to in Paradise Lost. The tropes within Speght's and Sowernam's defenses of Eve will rehabilitate her by effectively undermining Swetnam's attack: he will be placed amid the story of the Fall itself. The counter-narrative they construct slowly builds toward a much larger rejection of the premises of the "anti-feminist" debate. Speght and Sowernam begin very generally, suggesting that Swetnam's attack violates God's plan. Ultimately, they will position him as a tempter, thus shifting the traditional identity of seducer away from Eve and all women. Their initial response is to attack Swetnam's religious piety—in fact to insist on his absence of piety. Their claim that Swetnam's arguments against women are "irreligious" graces the cover of Speght's defense and occurs within Sowernam's first chapter (Mouzell title page; Sowernam, 2 [B1v]). In essence accusing Swetnam of heresy, both of their arguments become testimonies to the glories of God's creation. Sowernam"undertooke this enterprise [. . .] to set out the glory of Almightie God, in so blessed a worke of his Creation" (A3r); more than just defending women, "I am more violently vrged to defend diuine Maiestie, in the worke of his Creation" (B1r; my emphasis). Defending Eve is thus accomplished through the larger project of justifying God's creation of man and woman. Once they have established the blasphemy that characterizes Swetnam's argument, female defenders can deploy their more specific strategy for defending and redeeming Eve: distancing her from the popular and longstanding tradition of aligning her with the serpent. In the hands of Speght and Sowernam, the snake is reconfigured into the male pamphleteer, the very seducing force that must be resisted. By redirecting this identity of the snake onto either men or Swetnam himself, the Eve-like figure of the female defender can initiate a reenactment of the narrative of the Fall. Yet this time the story will end differently: she will now reject the arguments of the snake. These tracts consequently combine individual defenses of women with a narrative reworking of the story of the Fall, one that replots the anti-feminist conventions upon which these tracts are built.12 In Speght, when the serpent is identified as the male detractor of women, Eve is distanced from the epitaph of "earthly Serpent" (Swetnam, E2r). The result? Sowernam and Speght narrate a return to the Garden, offering a vision of a postlapsarian Eve who restages an account of the Fall. Speght begins to link the misogynistic pamphlet writer to the devil himself by employing the very motifs of the snake against Swetnam. Although the dominant animal image in A Mouzell for Melastomus is Swetnam as a biting dog, the imagery clusters also establish multiple links between him and a snake. In the opening letter, Swetnam is implicitly linked to a snake and a viper by the first reference. In fact, Speght employs this conceit to justify publishing her defense: "as Historiographers report the viper to doe, who in the Winter time doth vomit forth her poyson, and in the spring time sucketh the same up againe" (3), so too will Swetnam: he has threatened to publish another attack, and "a more deadly poyson" from this "viper" must be countered with this "Antidote" (3, 4). As she closes the first letter, Swetnam becomes a "fierie and furious Dragon" (5). Thus Speght establishes a constellation of images—of serpent, viper, and the worm-like image of the dragon—upon which she will draw extensively in the second letter (5). In her prefatory poem to Swetnam, who is described as "venime fowle" (6), the serpent imagery multiplies: "From standing water, which soon putrifies, can no good fish be expected; for it produceth no other creatures but those that are venemous or noisome, as snakes, adders, and such like" (7). Images of filth and disease plague the swamp's description, now inaugurated as Swetnam's imaginatively generative space. Speght then proceeds to more explicit images, transforming him into a serpent: "then had you not seemed so like the Serpent Porphirus, as now you doe [. . .] full of deadly poyson" (8). Apparently, it is from Swetnam himself, not just his writings, that readers will need an "Antidote" (4). This link in Speght's defense between Swetnam and "snakes, adders, and such like" invokes the narrative of the Fall, a narrative which recalls for the reader Swetnam's heretical act against God (Mouzell 7). Like Satan, he is offering to all mankind a temptation to accept his "blasphemous" argument about women's foulness (8). Once the language of the snake has been established, the connection of Swetnam to the devil can be made explicit: Swetnam becomes an associate of Satan. "Your corrupt Heart and railing Tongue, hath made you a fit scribe for the Divell" (7; my emphasis). Speght continues to paint Swetnam as a mouthpiece for the devil as his remarks are characterized as "this doctrine of Divells" (9). And routinely, Speght equates Swetnam with the devil by recalling the Genesis image of Satan's entrance into the snake: "Was Sathan crept into thy filthie Pen" (6). Swetnam, whose identity as author is metonymically indicated by "thy filthie Pen," actually becomes the snake that Satan enters. Possessed by Satan, then, Swetnam takes on the role of the serpent in the story of the Fall. Yet he simultaneously serves as a figure for the devil himself; as a "Seducer of the vulgar sort of men" through his use of this conventional "anti-feminist" language, Swetnam evolves from just a snake, to a figure animated by this devilish power, into the great "Seducer" himself (6). Once he is exposed as a mouthpiece for Satan, Swetnam's attacks on Eve and all women become radically undercut. Thus, before Speght even offers any defense of women, they have been absolved of the epitaph "earthly Serpents" (Swetnam, E2r), this phrase is now reassigned to the seducing Swetnam. This sustained association of Swetnam and the serpent effects a reversal of the very convention that Swetnam and others had employed against women. When Swetnam refers to women as "you earthly Serpents," he invokes a tradition allowing Eve (and women) to be blamed for the Fall because of an elided distinction between Satan and Eve (E2r): when Eve becomes the seductress, she is an "entic[ing],""entangl[ing]" figure who is not tricked by the reptilian-shaped Satan, but instead instigates the Fall (D2v; C4v). This projection of the identity of the serpent, and thus of Satan, onto Swetnam protects Eve and all women from this association while the pamphleteer is drawn into the Fall story himself. While Speght links Swetnam to serpent imagery and then to the devil himself, Sowernam distributes the title of serpents to men more generally. While "The Serpent at first tempted woman, he dare assault her no more in that shape, now he imployeth men to supply his part" (E1r). Instead, "men" have "turn'd to Serpents" since "The Serpent with men in their workes may agree" (H1v). The "contagion of Masculine serpents" stands in for a figure like Swetnam, although Sowerman does not connect him as explicitly to the serpent as did Speght (Sowernam G4v). Sowernam ends her text with the christening of all men as snakes, although we hear the implications for Swetnam. In her conclusion, she addresses him, asserting that "You haue exceeded in your furie against Widdowes," and she directs him to "recollect your wits, write out of deliberation, not out of furie; write out of aduice, not out of idlenesse: forbeare to charge women with faults which come from the contagion of Masculine serpents." That "contagion," she has shown us, is in fact a disease derived from pamphleteers like Swetnam (G4v). While both texts defend women through narratives in which Swetnam, or all men, become serpents, they also develop the figure of the defender of women who is positioned analogously to Eve. Sowerman pursues this identification most aggressively. While she defends women, Eve, and God's actions throughout, Sowernam's narrative actually links herself to the figure of Eve. Sowernam claims that she has "entred into the Garden of Paradice, and there haue gathered the choysest flowers which that Garden may affoord, and those I offer to you" (A4r). She thus returns to the story of Eve and Adam in Eden by literally returning to that site. Her goal is to offer an alternate defense through an alternative narrative of the Garden. Sowernam, in positioning herself as a postlapsarian Eve, is able to enter this space in order to make her argument. This fusion of herself with Eve also stands as an inversion of the normal use of Eve, particularly in misogynistic tracts. In the tradition of these tracts, and of misogyny in general, Eve in her act of disobedience, vanity, and pride becomes all women. That link between Eve and women is what Sowernam seizes on: because all women are like Eve, she can assume a position like the first of women. Once that association with Eve allows her access to the Garden, she can then reconfigure women's identity through her journey back into the Garden. Sowernam's rehabilitation of Eve has occurred in large part through her extended identification with the first mother. Sowernam actually reenters the Garden in order to author her defense: "I have entred into the Garden of Paradice, and there haue gathered the choysest flowers which that Garden may affoord, and those I offer to you" (A4r). In doing so, she paints herself as a pre-fallen Eve linked with the beauty, even the flowers of the Garden which Milton will have her name in Paradise Lost. Instead of shying away from an identification with Eve, Sowernam embraces this link as she develops the "esse" of all women (B3v); they all become the "choysest flowers." By embracing an identity with Eve, both for all women but explicitly here for herself, Sowernam restages the narrative of the Garden as a defense of women. Impersonating a postlapsarian Eve, Sowernam's narrative entrance into this space actually makes her argument. Sowernam accomplishes this in part by aligning Eve to the Garden through the oft-debated issue of Adam and Eve's birthplace. Sowernam identifies Eve as "a Paraditian Creature" (A4r) because she was formed in the Garden. Adam, conversely, was made outside of it, and thus—in one tradition of defenses—is less pure. Sowernam expands upon this issue of the birthplace of Eve, an idea then distributed to all women. As we will see, Sowernam transforms the walled boundaries of the Garden into a permeable membrane. In the process, Sowernam makes fluid the boundaries between womankind and this "Paraditian Creature," Eve. This permeable boundary—both of the Garden's wall and the association of Eve and all women—allows for this "Paraditian" identity to be transported out of the Garden. Because this "Paraditian" trait was within Eve, the women who follow from her carry this trace of the Garden's perfection within them. Further, they bring this essence of perfection into all marriages: "there is no delight more exceeding then to be ioyned in marriage with a Paraditian Creature. Who AS SHEE COMMETH OUT OF THE GARDEN, so shall you finde her a flower of delight, answerable to the Countrey from whence she commeth" (A4r, my emphasis). Eden is located in Eve, and thus within all women. The postlapsarian status of women, then, is not one separated from the positive elements of the prelapsarian Garden of Eden. Further, the departure from the Garden, originally an image of expulsion resulting from Eve's sin, now evokes Eve's original perfection. What Sowernam will call the "esse" or essence of Paradise thus exists within all (postlapsarian) women. The site of Eve's creation consequently becomes one of Sowernam's central arguments against Swetnam, allowing her to rewrite the Fall itself: "So that woman neither can or may degenerate in her disposition from that naturall inclination of the place, in which she was first framed, she is a Paradician, that is, a delightfull creature, borne in so delightfull a country" (B3v). While Sowernam will acknowledge the Fall, the character of Eve is defined—and elevated above Adam—by the Garden: "euery element hath his creatures, euery creature doth corresponde the temper and the inclination of that element wherein it hath and tooke his first and principll esse or being" (B3v). Eve becomes defined here by this "esse" of Paradise rather than by the act that results in her and Adam's expulsion from Eden. Instead of a portrait of the Fall as loss, Sowernam's defense playfully reconfigures the notion of women's innate identity to offer a redeemed Eve in this space as well as outside of it in postlapsarian marriage. The centrality of the story of the Fall, then, not only offers to these women an effective defense, it also becomes a method within their tracts: they turn to the narrative of the Garden because they can produce an alternative one for their purposes. The imagery patterns within Speght's prefatory material recast—literally—the players in the Fall: Eve is not the seducing serpent; the male misogynist pamphleteer is. We will have to wait until 1621 to see Speght restage Eve's actions in her second publication, a volume of poems that operates in concert with her earlier tract. Her 1621 publication of A Dreame, a poem described on the volume's title page as "imaginarie in manner" but "reall in matter," returns to this same constellation of motifs which invokes the narrative of the Garden and the Fall. Like Sowernam, Speght will cast herself as a figure for Eve when she identifies herself as the writer of defenses for women. Here, her method—as in Sowernam's earlier text—includes locating Speght within a reconfigured version of the Fall and thus aligning her with a portrait of a redeemed Eve. She accomplishes this through a decisively gendered narrative of the acquisition of knowledge. While the Mouzell has received a fair amount of attention because of recent scholarly interest in the "anti-feminist" debate and the resulting entrance of women into print, the entire publication in which A Dreame appears, Mortalities Memorandum, has generated less interest. And yet, in A Dreame we see Speght return in significant and complex ways to the issue of female culpability: the prefatory material to the text even announces a thematic and intertextual connection between her earlier 1617 and this 1621 publication. Explicitly invoking the earlier text that Speght had published, this poem also sustains her strategies in the Mouzell. Here, her method—as in Sowernam's earlier text—includes aligning herself with a reconfigured version of the Fall and thus with a portrait of a redeemed Eve, now introduced to us within a narrative about acquiring knowledge.13 The prefatory material to Mortalities Memorandum makes explicit the connection between this publication and Speght's Mouzell. These are purposely intertextual works as Speght uses this opportunity to invoke her earlier publication: because of "my mouzeling Melastomus, I am now, as by a strong motive induced (for my rights sake) to produce and divulge this off-spring of my indevour, to prove them further futurely who have formerly deprived me of my due, imposing my abortive upon the father of me, but not of it" (45). Even her insistence on authorship is infused with the defense of women to which that earlier tract was committed. Speght continues to assert her authorship in the resulting dream vision. She allegorically stages her textual exchange with Swetnam'sArraignment here: But by the way I saw a full fed Beast, Which roared like some monster, or a Devill, And on Eves sex he foamed filthie froth, As if that he had had the falling evill; To whom I went to free them from mishaps, And with a Mouzel sought to binde his chaps. A Dreame, a metatextual meditation on the act of writing and publishing by a woman, is equally a defense of "Eves sex" against the "Devill" that is Swetnam. The conventions that mark defenses consequently grace the body of A Dreame, complementing both the form and purpose of her earlier publication. A Dreame contains a list of well-educated women, one meant to illustrate the good traits of women. Cleobulina, and Demophila, with Telesilla, as Historians tell, (Whose fame doth live, though they have long bin dead) Did all o