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: The Masculinities of John Milton: Cultures and Constructs of Manhood in the Major Works

2023; University of Chicago Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/727479

1545-6951

Catherine Gimelli Martin,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Masculinities of John Milton: Cultures and Constructs of Manhood in the Major Works. Elizabeth Hodgson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. ix+219.Catherine Gimelli MartinCatherine Gimelli MartinUniversity of Memphis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreElizabeth Hodgson has produced a highly sophisticated and challenging study of Milton’s “masculinities,” his diverse yet nevertheless similar approaches to manhood. The end result is remarkably straightforward and unambiguous: all previous scholarship portraying “a progressive and inclusive,” much less a “feminist-friendly Milton” (4, 20 n. 12), is severely mistaken; this poet is unfriendly to anyone outside his own gender and caste. He attacks not only the English lower classes but “Catholics as well as Jews, Turks, Arabs,” the Irish and (as detailed in her postlude) the Scots as “Philistine, ignorant, ill-educated, or unEnglish” (5). Heavily dependent upon the work of Eve Sedgewick and more recent queer theorists, this study also finds the poet marginalizing, silencing, and all but dehumanizing fictional females as well. Strangely, however, actual females and most males aside from the subjects of several sonnets are not considered here, perhaps because Hodgson’s real subject is the virtually monolithic male culture on display in virtually all of Milton’s texts. Nevertheless, most of the book’s complaints about the poet’s principles, politics, and biases are not entirely new, and several mainline Miltonists (chiefly Paul Stevens, Stephen Fallon, and Thomas Luxon) are frequently cited to support them. What is new is faulting masculine culture itself for Milton’s purported failure to validate his reputation as an early modern liberal.Hodgson’s case rests on close readings of literary texts along with a wide range of recent studies of early modern class, gender, and homosocial culture, far too wide a range to be summarized or evaluated here. They offer substantially new perspectives on this culture, but Hodgson’s overall literary, contextual, and intertextual methods are far more questionable. Almost entirely absent is any account of Milton’s Protestant belief system or its foundations in contemporary biblical hermeneutics, and the book is also largely silent on Civil War, Protectorate, and Restoration politics. The midcentury Putney Debates offer a welcome exception to the rule, but context remains a problem since their principles belonged to a narrow segment of society from which Milton kept a notable distance both at the time and in his later prose. Here as throughout, Hodgson’s imaginative but highly selective handling of historical detail recalls the American new historicists, who have often been justly criticized as more often invoking contemporary rather than early modern issues.Readers who share Hodgson’s outlook and concerns may well wish to overlook the historical problems raised by her approach, but other frequent lapses in literary judgment and categorization are harder to ignore, especially on such elementary matters as genre and style. For instance, she reads Milton’s sonnets as Petrarchan dramatic public performances rather than late Italianate sonnets complexly expressing deeply felt personal problems. Of course, some of these unpublished lyrics are indeed cast in the form of public performances, but it is generally agreed that even Milton’s Cromwell sonnet (far more critical of the Lord Protector than Hodgson concedes) may have never reached its addressee. It was more probably shared with private friends sympathetic to the poet’s idiosyncratic religious outlook, which again Hodgson does not consider. His closely related public attacks on any form of state-financed ministry, the main subject of the sonnet in question, disappear in favor of his quasi-militaristic attack on the Scots nation and religion. Ironically, however, most of its headnotes inform us that the sonnet’s main goal was to prevent Cromwell from institutionalizing his Independents, who were actually opponents of the Scots Presbyterian faction. This simultaneous slighting of genre, theme, and context is unfortunately all too characteristic of Hodgson’s treatment of Milton’s poetry and prose alike, causing his lifelong antimonarchical crusades mostly to disappear along with personal poems and letters that, like his Latin poem to his father, might reveal important aspects of his masculinity.Otherwise, Hodgson’s methods are much more conventional, examining selected prose and poetry in chronological order. Her first chapter places Milton’s early treatise Of Education alongside his Ludlow masque, using other near contemporary authors to read the former as an assault on maternal education and the latter on how “homosocial schooling” teaches young men their “professorial rights to silence their (feminized) underlings” as well as how to “traffick … in young women” (36–37). No matter that the chief pedagogues in this masque are a wise older sister independently able to put a would-be seducer in his place and the healing nymph Sabrina; Hodgson’s theme triumphs over mere details. Similarly, she maintains that Of Education aims only to construct “replaceably equipped Englishmen, not individuals or even edifying friends” (32), even though Milton’s students (including his two Phillips nephews and Cyriak Skinner) indeed became his lifelong friends. Hodgson does examine the Skinner sonnet on Milton’s blindness, but concludes that this student-friend is “imaginary” and the sonnet itself a purely egoistic exercise (184–86).Chapter 2 takes aim at an easier target, Milton’s divorce tracts, but many of its conclusions are equally counterlogical. Understanding the poet’s analogy between the state and household in an unusually literal manner, it concludes that the “quintessential bourgeois subject is a husband without a wife” (71). Contradicting nearly all current scholarship on Protestant marriage, Hodgson instead turns to Eikon Basilike’s portrait of Charles I’s forced separation from his wife as an example of Milton’s “ideal” marriage. Although the late king neither wrote nor authorized this forgery, Hodgson argues that both men came to regard divorce as preferable to the confining “one-flesh model of marriage” (at best “oddly masturbatory or at least narcissistic” [71]), since, like Queen Henrietta Maria, wives covet “phallic dominance” over their spouses (73). Hence Milton agrees with his enemy Charles that “Englishmen can be public-spirited” only by “zon[ing] off this wifely influence” as completely as possible (75), even though his divorce tracts present an entirely contrary view of marriage as legitimized only through mutual conversation between husband and wife, as demonstrated in the domestic sections of Paradise Lost.Chapter 3 then proceeds to reread Paradise Lost as a poem chiefly concerned with male conversation to the exclusion of women. Eve is entirely left out of this discussion, which features the epic dialogues between Adam, God, and the two angels sent to counsel Adam. Ignoring both the biblical background of these dialogues and Milton’s unconventionally broad treatment of Eve, Hodgson turns to contemporary male authors who promote the arts of conversation as an exclusively masculine preoccupation. She does concede that traditional men found this new emphasis on words effeminate and that female salons had already begun on the Continent, but not that Ben Jonson contrarily devoted an entire play (Epicoene) to the dangers not only of marriage but of female conversation. Fortunately, chapter 4 turns to a new and much better-documented discussion of Milton’s mixed sentiments on military as opposed to purely intellectual warfare. Placing both Areopagitica and Paradise Regained in the context of the Putney Debates, Hodgson here supports the consensus view that Milton is psychologically far more at home in the idealized realm of the solitary, self-righteous “warfaring Christian” than among a military “band of brothers.” While some scholars have debated this conclusion, Hodgson’s choice of texts and close attention to detail add substantial support to the other side. Yet in the next chapter (chap. 5), she again challenges not only most previous scholarship but the conclusions of chapter 4 by asserting that Samson Agonistes testifies to its Milton-like hero’s complete identification with the chorus’s classical band of military brothers. Their uniformly tribal, misogynistic, and self-righteous sense of nationhood and even their anti-idolatry and monotheism are exclusionary ideologies the drama presents not to be condemned, as many scholars argue, but to be adopted and upheld by their audience. Of course, that view is not entirely new, either, but why the author chooses to contradict her earlier chapter remains a real question.Hodgson’s postlude focuses on three sonnets, the previously mentioned Cromwell and Skinner sonnets and another defending Milton’s third divorce tract, Tetrachordon, as proof that this genre is innately “masculinized” (175). This point is objectionable on innumerable grounds, but this concluding section provides such a complete summary of Hodgson’s views that readers desiring a synopsis should turn to it first, especially the many feminists who may object to its cavalier (pun intended) dismissal of seventeenth-century women as citizen-subjects. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727479 Views: 76Total views on this site HistoryPublished online September 15, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.