English 324:

Electronic Reserve Text: Gilbert and Gubar, "Milton's Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers"

from The Madwoman in the Attics

Milton's Bogey:
Patriarchal Poetry and Women
Readers

I say that words are men and when we spell
In alphabets we deal with living things;
With feet and thighs and breasts, fierce heads, strong wings;
Material Powers, great Bridals, Heaven and Hell.
There is a menace in the tales we tell.
--Anna Hempstead Branch

Torn from your body, furbished from your rib;
I am the daughter of your skeleton,
Born of your bitter and excessive pain . . . .
--Elinor Wylie

Patriarchal Poetry their origin and their history their history
patriarchal poetry their origin patriarchal poetry their history
their origin patriarchal poetry their history their origin
patriarchal poetry their history patriarchal poetry their origin
patriarchal poetry their history their origin.
---Gertrude Stein

Adam had a time, whether long or short, when he could wander about on a fresh and peaceful earth . . . . But poor Eve found him there, with all his claims upon her, the moment she looked into the world. That is a grudge that woman has always had against the Creator [so that some] young witches got everything they wanted as in a catoptric image [and believed] that no woman should allow herself to be possessed by any male but the devil . . . . this they got from reading ---in the orthodox witches' manner-the book of Genesis backwards.
--Isak Dinesen

To resurrect "the dead poet who waw Shakespeare's sister," Virginia Woolf declares in A Room of One's Own, literate women must "look at

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Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view."(1) The perfunctory reference to Milton is curiously enigmatic, for the allusion has had no significant development,(2) and Woolf, in the midst of her peroration, does not stop to explain it. Yet the context in which she places this apparently mysterious bogey is highly suspicious. Shutting out the view, Milton's bogey cuts women off from the spaciousness of possibility, the predominantly male landscapes of fulfillment Woolf Ilas been describing throughout A Room. Worse, locking women into "the common sitting room" that denies them individuality, it is a murderous phantom that, if it didn't actually kill "Judith Shakespeare," has helped to keep her dead for hundreds of years, over and over again separating her creative spirit from "the body which she has so often laid down."

Nevertheless, the mvstery of Woolf's phrase persists. For who (or what) is Milton's bogey? Not only is the phrase enigmatic, It is ambiguous. It may refer to Milton himself, the real patriarchal cherub, to use Harold Bloom's critical terminology-- "Covering Cherub" who blocks the view for women poets." It may refer to Adam, who is Milton'a (and God's) favored creature, and therefore also a Covering Cherub of sorts. Or it may refer to another fictitious specter, one more bogey created by Milton: his inferior and Satanically inspired Eve, who has also intimidated women and blocked their view of possibilities both real and literary. That Woolf does not definitely indicate which of these meanings she intended suggests that the ambiguity of her phrase may have been deliberate Certainly other Woolfian allusions to Milton reinforce the idea that for her, as for most other women writers, both he and the creatures of his imagination constitute the misogynistic essence of what Gertrude Stein called "patriarchal poetry."

As our discussion of the metaphor of literary paternity suggested, literary women, readers and writers alike, have long been "confused" and intimidated by the patriarchal etiology that defines a solitary Father God as the only creator of all things, fearing that such a cosmic Author might be the sole legitimate model for all earthly authors. Miton's myth of origins, summarizing a long misogynistic tradition, clearly implied this notion to the many women writers who directly or indirectly recorded anxieties about his paradigmantic patriarchal poetry. A minimal list of such figures would include

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Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Mary SHelley, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, H. D., and Sylvia Plath, as well as Stein, Nin, and Woolf herself. In addition, in an effort to come to terms with the institutionalized and often elaborately metaphorical misogyny Milton's epic expresses, many of these women devised their own revisionary myths and metaphors.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, is at least in part a despairingly acquiescent "misreading" of Paradise Lost, with Eve-Sin apparently exorcised from the story but really translated into the monster that Milton hints she is. Emilv Bronte's Wuthering Heights, by contrast, is a radically corrective "misreading" of Milton, a kind of Blakeian Bible of Hell, wit the fall from heaven to hell transformed into a fall from a realm that conventional theology would associate with "hell" (the Heights)( to a place that parodies "heaven" (the Grange). Similarly Elizabeth Barrctt Browning's "A Drama of' Exile," Charlotte Bronte's Shirley and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" all include or imply revisionary critiques of Paradise Lost, while George Eliot's Middlemarrh uses Dorothea's worship of that "affable archangel" Casaubon specifically to comment upon the disastrous relationship between Milton and his daughters. And in her undaughterly rebellion against that "Papa above" whom she also called "a God of Flint" and "Burglar! Banker--Father," Emily Dickinson, as Albert Gelpi has noted, was "passionately Byronic," and therefore, as we shall ssee, subtly anti-Miltonic.(4) For all these women, in other words, the question of Milton's misogyny was not in any sense an academic one.(5)( On the contrary, since it was only through patriarchal poetry that they learned "their origin and their history"--learned, that is, to define themselves as misogynistic theology defined them--most of these writers read Milton with painful absorption.

Considering all this, Woolf's 1918 diary entry on Paradise Lost, an apparently casual summary of reactions to a belated study of that poem, may well represent all female anxieties about "Milton's bogey," and is thus worth quoting in its entirety.

Though I am not the only person in Sussex who reads Milton, I mean to write down my impressions of Paradise Lost while I

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am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing I left in my mind. I have left many riddles unread. I have slipped on too easily to taste the full flavour. However I see, and agree to some extent in believing, that this full flavour is the reward of highest scholarship. I am struck by the extreme difference
between this poem and any other. It lies, I think, ill the sublime aloofless and impersonality of the emotion. I have never read Cowper on the sofa, but I can imagine that the sofa is a degraded substitute for Paradise Lost. The substance of Milton is all made of wonderful, beautiful, and masterly descriptions of angels' bodies, battles, flights, dwelling places. He deals in horror and immensity and squalor and sublimity but never in the passions of the human heart. Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one's own joys and sorrows! I get no help, in judging life, I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women;except for the peevish personalities about marriage and the woman's duties. He was the first of the masculinists, but his disparagement rises from his own ill luck and seems even a spiteful last word in his domestic quarrels. But how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is! What poetry! I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been despatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries. Moreover, though there is nothing like Lady Macbeth's terror or Hamlet's cry, no pity or sympathy or intuition, the figures are majestic; in them is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion.(6)

Interestingly, even the diffident first sentence of this paragraph expresses an uncharacteristic humility, even nervousness, in the prersence of Milton's "sublime aloofness and impersonality." By 1918 Woolf was herself an experienced, widely published literary critic, as well as the author of one accomplished novel, with another in progress. In the preceding pages she has confidently set down judg-

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ments of Christina Rossetti ("She has the natural singing power"), Byron ("He has at least the male virtues"), Sophocles' Electra ("It's not so fearfully difficult after all"), and a number of other serious literary subjects. Yet Milton, and Milton alone, leaves her feeling puzzled, excluded, inferior, and even a little guilty. Like Greek or metaphysics, those other bastions of intellectual masculinity, Milton is for Woolf a sort of inordinately complex algebraic equation, an insolubable problem that she feels obliged--but unable
to solve ("I have left many riddles unread"). At the same time, his magnum opus seems to have little or nothing to do with her own, distinctively female perception of things ("Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one's own joys and sorrows?"). Her admiration, moreover, is cast in peculiarly vague, even abstract language ("how smooth, strong and elaborate it all is?"). And her feeling that Milton's verse (not the dramas of her beloved, androgynous Shakespeare) must be "the essence of which almost all other poetry is the dilution" perhaps explains her dutiful conclusion, with its strained insistence that in the depths of Milton's verse "is summed up much of what men thought of our place in the universe, of our duty to God, our religion." Our? Surely WOolf is speaking here "as a woman," to borrow one of her own favorite phrases, and surely her conscious or unconscious statement is clear: Milton's bogey, whatever else it may be, is ultimately his cosmology, his vision of "what men thought" and his powerful rendering of the culture myth that Woolf, like most other literary women, sensed at the heart of Western literary patriarchy.

The story that Milton, "the first of the masculinists," most notably tells to women is of course the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also, for her, the garden of poetry. In an extraordinarily important and yet also extraordinary distinctive way, therefore, Milton is for women what Harold Bloom (who might here be paraphrasing Woolf) calls "the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles." In a line even more appropriate to women, Bloom adds that "the motto to English poetry since Milton was stated by Keats: "life to him would be death to me.'"(7) And interestingly, Woolf herself echoes just this line in speaking of her father years after his death. Had Sir Leslie Stephen

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lived into his nineties, she remarks, "His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books:--inconceivable."(8) For whatever Milton is to the male imagination, to the female imagination Milton and the inhibiting Father--the Patriarch of patriarchs--are one.

For Woolf, indeed, even Milton's manuscripts are dramatically associated with male hegemony and female subordination. One of the key confrontation in A Room occurs when she decides to consult the manuscript of Lycidas in the "Oxbridge" library and is forbidden entrance by an agitated male librarian

like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.(9)

Locked away from female contamination at the heart of ''Oxbridge's paradigmatically patriarchal library--in the very heaven of libraries, so to speak, there is a Word of power, and the Word is Milton's

Although A Room merely hints at the cryptic but crucial power of the Miltonic text and its misogynistic context, Woolf clearly defined Milton as a frightening "Inhibitor" in the fictional (rather than critical) uses she made or did not make of Milton throughout her literary career. Both Orlando and Between the Acts, for instance, her two most ambitious and feminist re-visions of history, appear quite deliberately to exclude Milton from their radically transformed chronicles of literary events. Hermaphroditic Orlando meets Shakepeare the enigmatic androgyne, and effeminate Alexander Pope--but John Milton simply does not exist for him/her, just as he doesn't exist for Miss La Trobe, the revisionalry historian of Between the Acts. As Bloom notes, one of the ways in which a poet evades anxiety is to deny even the existence of the precursor poet who is the source of anxiety.

On the other hand, when WOolf does allude to Milton in a novel, as she does in The Voyage Out, her reference grants him his pernicious power in its entirety. Indeed, the motto of the heroine, Rachel Vinrace, might well be Keats's "Life to him would be death to me," for twenty-four-year-old Rachel, dying of some unnamed disease

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mysteriously related to her sexual initiation by Terence Hewet, seems to drown in waves of Miltonic verse. "Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape, so that it was not necessary to understand what he was saying . . . [But] the words, in spite of what Terence had said, seemed to be laden with meaning, and perhaps it was for this reason that it was painful to listen to them."(10) An invocation to "Sabrina Fair," the goddess "under the glassy, cool, translucent wave," the words Terence reads from Comus seek the salvation of a maiden who has been turned to stone. But their effect on Rachel is very different. Heralding illness, they draw her toward a "ddeep pool of sticky water" murky with images derived from Woolf's own episodes of madness, and iultimately they plunge her into the darkness "at the bgottom of the sea."(11) Would death to Milton, one wonders, have been life for Rachel?

Charlotte Bronte would certainly have thought so. Because Woolf was such a sophisticated literary critic, whe may have been at once the most conscious and the most anxious heiress of the Miltonic culture myth. But among earlier women writers it was Bornte who seemed most aware of Milton's threatening qualities, particularaly of the extent to which his influence upon women's fate might be seen as--to borrow a pun from Bloom--an unhealthy influenza. (12) In Shirley she specifically attacked the patriarchal Miltonic cosmology, within whose baleful context she saw both her female protagonists sickening, orphaned and starved by a maledominated society. "Milton was great; but was he good?" askes Shirley Keeldar, the novel's eponymous heroine.

[He] tried to see the first woman, but . . . he saw her not. . . . It was his cook that he saw; or it was Mrs. Gill, as I have seen her, making custards, in the heat of summer, in the cool dairy, with rose-trees and nasturtiums about the latticed window, preparing a cold collation for the rectors,--preserves, and "dulcet creams"--puzzled "What choice to choose for delicacy best."(13)

Shirley's allusion is to the passage in book 5 of Paradise Lost in which housewifely Eve, "on hospitable thoughts intent," serves Adam and his angelic guest an Edenic cold collation of fruits and nuts,

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. berries and "dulcet creams." With its descriptions of mouth-watering seraphic banquets and its almost Victorian depiction of primordial domestic bliss, this scene is especially vulnerable to the sort of parodic wit Bronte has Shirley turn against it. But the alternative that Bronte and Shirley propose to Milton's Eve-as-little-woman is more serious and implies an even severer criticism of Paradise Lost's visionary misogyny. The first woman, Shirley hypothesizes, was not an Eve, "half doll, half angel," and always potential fiend. Rather, she was a Titan, and a distinctively Promethean one at that:

"... from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus.... The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage,-the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages,-the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which ... could conceive and bring forth a Messiah ... I saw--I now see--a woman-Titan. ... she i·eclines he~r bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehovah's daughter, as Adam was his son."

Like Woolf's concept of "Milton's bogey," this apparently bold vision of a titanic Eve is interestingly (and perhaps necessarily) ambiguous. It is possible, for instance, to read the passage as a comparatively conventional evocation of maternal Nature giving birth to male greatness. Because she "bore Prometheus," the first woman's breast nursed daring, strength, vitality. At the same time, however, the syntax here suggests that "the daring which could content with Omnipotence" and "the strength which could bear a
thousand years of bondage" belonged, like the qualities they parallel "the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence ... which ... could ... bring forth a Messiah"--to the first woman herself. Not
only did Shirley's Eve bring forth a Prometheus, then, she was herself a Prometheus, contending with Omnipotence and defying bondage.'" Thus, where Milton's Eve is apparently submissive, except for one moment of disastrous rebellion in which she listens to the

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wrong voice, Shirley's is strong, assertive, vital. Where Milton's Eve is domestic, Shirley's is daring. Where Mitten's Eve is from the first curiously hollow, as if somehow created corrupt, "in outward show I
Elaborate, of inward less exact" (PL 8. 538-39) Shirley's is filled with "unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence." Where Milton's Eve is a sort of divine afterthought, an almost superffuous and mostly
material being created from Adam's "supernumerary" rib, Shirley's is spiritual, primary, "heaven-born." Finally, and perhaps most significantly, where Milton's Eve is usually excluded from God's sight
and, at crucial moments in the history of Eden, drugged and silenced by divinely ordained sleep, Shirley's speaks "face to face" with God. We may even speculate that, supplanted by a servile and destructive
specter, Shirley's Eve is the: first avatar of that dead poet whom Woolf, in her re-vision of this myth, called Judith Shakespeare and who was herself condemned to death by Milton's bogey.

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Besides having interesting descendants, Shirley's titanic woman has interesting ancestors. For instance, if she is herself a sort of Prometheus as well as Prometheus's mother, she is in a sense closer to
Milton's Satan than to his Eve. Certainly "the daring which could contend with Omnipotence" and "the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage" are qualities that recall not only the
firm resolve of Shelley's Prometheus (or Byron's or Goethe's or Aeschylus's) but "the unconquerahle will" Milton's fiend opposes to "The tyranny of Heav'n." Also, the gigantic size of Milton's fallen
angel (" ... in bulk as huge / As whom the Fables name of monstrous size,/ Titanian, or Earth-born" [PL 1. 196-98]) is repeated in the enormity of Shirley's Eve. She "reclines her bosom on the ridge of
Stillbro' Moor" just as Satan lies "stretched out huge in length" in book 1 of Paradise Lost, and just as Blake's fallen Albion (another neo-Miltonic figure) appears with his right foot "on Dover cliffl~,
his heel / On Canterbury ruins; his right hand Icoveringl loft); Wales I His left Scotland," etc.'" But of course Milton's Satan is himself the ancestor of all the Promethean heroes conceived by the Romantic
poets who influenced Bronte. And as if to acknowledge that fact, she has Shirley remark that under her Titan woman's breast "I see

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her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening"--lucifer, the "son of the morning" and the evening star, who is Satan in his unfallen state. Milton's Satan transformed into a Promethean Eve may at first sound like a rather unlikely literary development. But even the briefest
reflectionon Paradise Lost should remind us that, despite Eve's apparent passivity and domesticity, Milton himself seems deliberately to have sketched so many parallels between her and Satan that it is
hard at times for the unwary reader to distinguish the sinfulness of one from that of the other. As Stanley Fish has pointed out, for instance, Eve's temptation speech to Adam in book 9 is "a tissue of
Satanic echoes," with its central argument "Look on me. I do not believe," an exact duplicate of the anti-religious empiricism em- bedded in Satan's earlier temptation speech to her.'6 Moreover,
where Adam falls out of uxorious "fondness," out of a self-sacrificing love for Eve which, at least to the modern reader, seems quite noble, Milton's Eve falls for exactly the same reason that Satan does: because
she wants to be "as Gods," and because, like him, she is secretly dissatisfied with her place, secretly preoccupied with questions of "equality." After his fall, Satan makes a pseudo-libertarian speech
to his fellow angels in which he asks, "Who can in reason then or right assume/Monarchy over such as live by right I His equals, if in power and splendor less, IIn freedom equal?" (PI, 5. 794-97).
After her fall, Eve considers the possibility of keeping the fruit to herself "so to add what wants IIn Female Sex, the more to draw [Adam's] Love, I And render me more equal" (PL 9. 821-23).
Again, just as Milton's Satan--despite his pretensions to equality with the divine--dwindles from an angel into a dreadful (though subtle) serpent, so Eve is gradually reduced from an angelic being
to a monstrous and serpentine creature, listening sadly as Adam thunders, "Out of my sight, thou Serpent, that name best I Befits thee with him leagu'd, thyself as false I And hateful; nothing wants,
but that thy shape, I Like his, and colour Serpentine may show I Thy inward fraud" (PL 10. 86771) The enmity God sets between the woman and the serpent is thus the discord necessary to divide those
who are not opposites or enemies but too much alike, too much attracted to each other. In addition,just as Satan feeds Eve with the forbidden fruit, so Eve--who is consistently associated with fruit,

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not only as Edenic chef but also as herself the womb or bearer ol` fruit--feeds the fruit to Adam. And finally, just as Satan's was a fall into generation, its first consequence being the appearance of the
material world of Sin and Death, so Eve's (and not Adam's) fB11 completes the human entry into generation, since its consequence is the pain of birth, death's necessary opposite and mirror image. And
just as Satan is humbled and enslaved by his desire for the bitter fruit, / so Eve is humbled by becoming a slave not only to Adam the individual man but to Adam the archetypal man, a slave not only to
her husband but, as de Beauvoir notes, to the species.'? By contrast, Adam's fall is fortunate because, among other reasons, from the woman's point of view his punishment seems almost like a reward
as he himself suggests when he remarks that "On mee the Cu
aslope/ Glanc'd on the ground, with labour I must earn I My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse..." (PL 10. 1053-55).

We must remember, however, that as Milton delineates it Eve's relationship to Satan is even richer, deeper, and more complex than these few points suggest. Her bond with the fiend is strengthened not
only by the striking similarities that link her to him, but also by the ways in which she resembles Sin, his female avatar and, indeed with the exception of Urania, who is a kind of angel in the poet's
head--the only other female who graces (or, rather, disgraces) Paradise Lost.'s Bronte's Shirley, whose titanic Eve is reminiscent of the Promethean aspects of Milton's devil, does not appear to have
noticed this relationship, even in her bitter attack upon Milton's little woman. But we can be sure that Bronte herself, like many other female readers, did --if only unconsciously-- perceive the likeness.
For not only is Sin female, like Eve, she is serpentine as Satan is and as Adam tells Eve she is. Her body, "Woman to the waist, and fair, I But [endingl foul in many a scaly foldl Voluminous and vast, a Serpent
arm'd / With mortal sting" exaggerates and parodies female anatomy just as the monstrous bodies of Spenser's Error and Duessa do (PI, 2. 650-53). Similarly, with her fairness ironically set against fbulncss,
Sin parodies Adam's fearful sense of the tension between Eve's "outward show/ Elaborate" and her "inward less exact." Moreover, just as Eve is a secondary and contingent creation, made from Adam's
rib, so Sin, Satan's "Daughter," burst from the fallen angel's brain like a grotesque subversion of the Graeco-Roman story of wise

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Minerva's birth from the head ofJove. In a patriarchal Christian context the pagan goddess Wisdom may, Milton suggests, become the loathesome demoness Sin, for the intelligence of heaven is made up
exclusively of "Spirits Masculine," and the woman, like her dark double, Sin, is a "fair defect I Of Nature" (PL 10. 890-93). If Eve's punishment, ·moreover, is her condemnation to the anguish
of maternity, Sin is the only model of maternity other than the "wide womb of Chaos" with which Paradise Lost provides her, and as a model Milton's monster conveys a hideous warning of what it means
to be a "slave to the species." Birthing innumerable Hell Hounds in a dreadful cycle, Sin is endlessly devoured by her children, who continually emerge from and return to her womb, where they bark
and howl unseen. Their bestial sounds remind us that to bear young is to be not spiritual but animal, a thing of flesh, an incomprehensible and uncomprehending body, while their ceaseless suckling presages
the exhaustion that leads to death, companion of birth. And Death is indeed their sibling as well as the father who has raped (and thus fused with) his mother, Sin, in order to bring this pain into being,
just as "he" willmeld with Eve when in eating the apple she ends up "eating Death" (PL 9. 792).

Of course, Sin's pride and her vulnerability to Satan's seductive wiles make her Eve's double too. It is at Satan's behest, after all, that Sin disobeys God's commandments and opens the gates of hell to
let the first cause of evil loose in the world, and this act of hers is clearly analogous to Eve's disobedient eating of the apple, with its similar consequences. Like both Eve and Satan, moreover, Sin wants
to be "as Gods," to reign in a "new world of light and bliss" (PL 2. 867), and surely it is not insignificant that her moving but blasphemous pledge of allegiance to Satan ("Thou art my Father, thou my Author, thou/ My being gav'st me; whom should I obey I But thee, whom follow?" [PL 2. 864--66]) foreshadows Eve's most poignant speech to Adam ("But now lead on ... with thee to go, I Is to star here; without thee here to stay, I Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee/Art all things under Heav'n...." [PL 12. 614-18]), as if in some part of himself Milton meant not to instruct the reader by contrasting two modes of obedience but to undercut even Eve's "goodness" in advance. Perhaps it is for this reason that, in the grim shade of Sin's Medusa-like snakiness, Eve's beauty, too, begins (to

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an experienced reader of Paradise Lost) to seem suspect: her golden tresses waving in wanton, wandering ringlets suggest at least a sinister potential, and it hardly helps that so keen a critic as Hazlitt thought
her nakedness made her luscious as a piece of fruit.'" Despite Milton's well-known misogony, however, and the highly developed philosophical tradition in which it can be placed, all these connections, parallels, and doublings among Satan, Eve, and Sin are shadowy messages, embedded in the text of Paradise Lost, rather than carefully illuminated overt statements. Still, for sensitive female readers brought up in the bosom of a "masculinist," patristic, neo- Manichean church, the latent as well as the manifest content of such
a powerful work as Paradise Lost was (and is) bruisingly real. To such women the unholy trinity ofSatan, Sin and Eve, diabolically mimicking the holy trinity of God, Christ, and Adam,20 must have seemed
even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to illustrate that historical dispossession and degradation of the female principle which was to be imaginatively analyzed in the twentieth century by Robert
Graves, among others. "The new God," Graves wrote in The White Goddess, speaking of the rise of the Judaic-Pythagorean tradition whose culture myth Milton recounts,

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Milton, who offers at least lip service to the institution of matrimony, is never so intensely misogynistic as the fanatically celibate Essenes. But a similar though more disguised misogyny obviously
contributes to Adam's espousal of Right Reason as a means of transcending the worldly falsehoods propounded by Eve and Satan (and by his vision of the "Bevy of fair Women" whose wiles betrayed
the "Sons of God" [PL 1 i. 582, 622] ). And that the Right Reason of Paradise Lost did have such implications was powerfully understood by William Blake, whose fallen Urizenic Milton must reunite with
his female Emanation in order to cast off his fetters and achieve imaginative wholeness. Perhaps even more important for our purposes here, in the visionary epic Milton Blake reveals a sure grasp of the psychohistorical effects he thought Milton's misguided "chastity" had, not only upon Milton, but upon women themselves. While Milton-as-noble-bard , for instance, ponders "the intricate mazes of
Providence," Blake has his "six-fold Emanation" howl and wail, "Scatter'd thro' the deeplIn torment."22 Comprised of his three wives and three daughters, this archetypal abandoned woman knows
very well that Milton's anti-feminism has deadly implications for her own character as well as for her fBte. "Is this our Feminine Portion," Blake has her demand despairingly. "Are we Contraries
O Milton, Thou & I/O Immortal! how were we led to War the Wars of Death [?]" And, as if to describe the moral deformity such misogyny fosters in women, she explains that "Altho' our Human
Power can sustain the severe contentions ... our Sexual cannot: but flies into the [hell of] the Ulro. I Hence arose all our terrors in Eternity!"23

Still, although he was troubled by Milton's misogyny and was

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radically opposed to the Cartesian dualism Milton's vaguely Manichean cosmology anticipated, Blake did portray the author of Paradise Lost as the hero--the redeemer even--of the poem that bears his name. Beyond or behind Milton's bogey, the later poet saw, there was a more charismatic and congenial figure, a figure that Shirley and her author, like most other female readers, must also have perceived, judging by the ambiguous responses to Milton recorded by so many women. For though the epic voice of Paradise Lo.~t often sounds censorious and "masculinist" as it recounts and comments upon Western patriarchy's central culture myth, the epic's creator often seems to display such dramatic affinities with rebels against
the censorship of heaven that Romantic readers well might conclude with Blake that Milton wrote "in fetters" and "was of the devil's party without knowing it." 24 And so Blake, blazing a path for Shirle)
and for Shelley, for Byron and for Mary Shelley, and for all the Brontes, famously defined Satan as the real, burningly visionary god-the Los--of Paradise Lost, and "God" as the rigid and deat)l-
dealing Urizenic demon. His extraordinarily significant misreading clarifies not only the lineage of; say, Shelley's Prometheus, but also the ancestry of Shirley's titanic Eve. For if Eve is in so many negative
ways like Satan the serpentine tempter, why should she not also be akin to Satan the Romantic outlaw, the character whom (Harold Bloom reminds us) T. S. Eliot considered "Milton's curly-haired
Byronic hero"?25

That Satan is throughout much of Paradise Lost a handsome devil and therefore a paradigm for the Byronic hero at his most attractive is, of course, a point frequently made by critics of all persuasions,
including those less hostile than Eliot was to both Byron and Milton. Indeed, Satan's Prometheanism, the indomitable will and courage he bequeathed to characters like Shirley's Eve, almost seems to have
been created to illustrate some of the crucial features of Romanticism in general. Refusing, like Shelley's Prometheus, to submit to the "tyranny of Heaven," and stalking "apart in joyless revery" like
Byron's Childe Harold,2R Milton's Satan is as alienated from celestial society as an) of the early nineteenth-century poets maunit who made him their emblem. Accursed and self-cursing, paradoxical and mys-

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tical ("Which way I fly is hell; myself am Hell ... Evil be thou my Good" (PL 4. 75, 110]), he experiences the guilty double conscious- ness, the sense of a stupendous self capable of nameless and perhaps
criminal enormities, that Byron redefined in Manfred and Cain as marks of superiority. Moreover, to the extent that the tyranny of heaven is asSociated with Right Reason, Satan is Romantically anti-
rational in his exploration of the secret depths of himself and of the cosmos. He is anti-rational--and Romantic--too, in his indecorous yielding to excesses ofpassion, his Byronic "gestures fierce" and "mad
demeanor" (PL 4. 128-29). At the same time, his aristocratic egalitarianism, manifested in his war against the heavenly system of primogeniture that has unjustly elevated God's "Son" above even
the highest angels, suggests a Byronic (and Shelleyan and Godwinian) concern with liberty and justice for all. Thunder-scarred and world-weary, this black-browed devil would not, one feels, have been out
of place at Missolonghi.

Significantly, Eve is the only character in Paradise Lost for whom a rebellion against the hierarchical status quo is as necessary as it is for Satan. Though he is in one sense oppressed, or at least mani-
pulated, by God, Adam is after all to his own realm what God is to His absolute master and guardian of the patriarchal rights of primogeniture. Eve's docile speech in book 4 emphasizes this: "My Author
and Disposer, what thou bidd'st I Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains, I God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more I Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise" (PL 4. 63538). But the dream she has
shortly after speaking these words to Adam (reported in book 5) seems to reveal her true feelings about the matter in its fantasy of a
Satanic flight of escape from the garden and its oppressions: "Up
to the Clouds...I flew, and underneath beheld/TThe Earth out-
stretcht immense, a prospect wide I And various..." 27 (PL 5.86-89),
a redefined prospect of happy knowledge not unlike the one Woolf
imagines women viewing trom tlieir opened windows. And interest-
ingl~·, brief as is the passage describing Eve's Higfit, it foreshadowed
fhntasies that would recur rrequentl~· and compellingl~ in the writings
of both women and Romantic poets. Hyron's Cain, for instance,
disenchanted by what his author called the "politics of paradise,""n
flies through space with his seductive Lucifer like a masculine version
of Milton's Eve, and though Shirley's Eve is earthbound--almost

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earthlike--innumerahle other "Eves" of fi·male origin have flowil,
fallen, surfaced, or feared to fly, as if to acknowledge in a backhanded
sort of way the power of the dream Milton let Satan grant to Eve.
But whether female dreams ofnying escapes are derived from Miltonic
or Romantic ideas, or from some collective female unconscious, is a
difficult question to answer. For the connections between Satan, ~
Romanticism, and concealed or incipient feminism are intricate and
far-reaching indeed.
Certainly, if both Satan and Eve are in some sense alienated,
rebellious, and therefore Byronic figures, the same is true for women
writers as a class--for Shirley's creator as well as for Shirlev. for
Virginia Woolf as well as for "Judith Shakespeare." Dispossessed by
her older brothers--the "Sons of God"--educated to submission,
er?joined to silence, the woman writer, in fantasy if not in reality,
must often have "stalked apart injoyless revery," like Byron's heroes,
like Satan, like Prometheus. Feeling keenly the discrepancy between
the angel she was supposed to he and the angry demon she knew slie
often was, she must have experienced the same paradoxical double
consciousness of guilt and greatness that afflicts both Satan and, sa)·,
Manfred. Composing herself to saintly stillness, brooding narcissisti-
call), like Eve over her own image and like Satan over her own power,
she may even have feared occasionally that like Satan--or Byron's
Lara, or his Manfred--she would betray her secret lury by "gestures
fierce" or a "mad demeanor." Asleep in the bower of domesticity,
she would be unable to silence the Romantic/Satanic whisper
"Why sleepst thou Eve?"--with its invitation to join the visionary
world of those who fly by night.
Again, though Milton goes to great lengths to associate Adam,
God, Christ, and the angels with visionary prophetic powers, that
visionary night-world of poetry and imagination, insol8r as it is ;1
demonic world, is more often subtly associated in Paradise Lost with
Eve, Satan, and femaleness than with any of the "good" characters
except the epic speaker himself. Blake, of course, saw this quite clearl !·.
It is the main reason for the Satan-God role reversal he postulates.
But his friend Mar), Wollstonecraft and her Romantic female descen-
dants must Irave seen it too,just as Byron and Shelle); did. For rhougli
Adam is magically shown, as in a crystal ball, what the future holds,
Satan and Eve are both the real dreamers of Paradise Lost, possessed

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in the Komantic sense by seductive rcnections and uncontrollable
imaginings of alternative lives to the point where, like Manfred or
Christabel or the Keats of The Fall Of Hyperion, they are so scorched
by visionary longings they become fevers of themselves, to echo
Moneta's words to Keats. But even this suffering sense of the hellish
discrepancy between Satan's (or Eve's) aspiration and position is a
model of aesthetic nobility to the Romantic poet and the Komantically
inspired feminist. Contemplating the "lovely pair" ofAdam and Eve
in their cosily unfallen state, Mary Wollstonecraft confesses that she
feels "an emotion similar to what we feel when children are playing
or animals sporting," and on such occasions "I have with conscious
dignity, or Satanic pride, turned to hell for sublimer subjects." 99 Her
deliberate, ironic confusion of "conscious dignity" and "Satanic
pride," together with her reverence for the "sublime," prefigure
Shelley's Titan as clearly as Shirley's titanic woman. The imagining
of more "sublime" alternative lives, moreover, as Blake and Woll-
stonecraft also saw, reinforces the revolutionary fervor that Satan the
visionary poet, like Satan the aristocratic Byronic rebel, defined for
women and Romahtics alike.
That the Romantic aesthetic has often been linked with visionary
politics is, ofcourse, almost a truism. From the apocalyptic revolutions
of Blake and Shelley to those of Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, moreover,
re-visions ofthe Miltonic culture myth have been associated with such
repudiations of the conservative, hierarchical "politics of paradise."
"In terrible majesty," Blake's Satanic Milton thunders, "Obey thou
the words of the Inspired Man. / All that can be anllihilated must be
annihilated/That the children ofJerusalem may be saved from
slavery."30 Like him, Bvron's Lucifer offers autonomy and knowledge
-the prererluisites of freedom -- to Cain, while Shelley's Prometheus,
overthrowing the tyraniiy of heaven, ushers in "Life, Joy, Empire,
and Victory" for all of humanity."' Even D. H. Lawrence's Satanic
snake, emergirrg one hundred years later fi·om the hellishlv burning
bowels of the earth, seems to be "one of the lords I Of life," an e?tilcd
king "now due to be crowned again," signalling a rcborn societv.s2
For in the revolutionary cosmologies ol. all these Romantic poets,
both Satan and his other self, Lucifer ("son of the morning"), were
emblematic of that liberated dawn in which it would be bliss to be
alive.

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It is not sllrprising, then, that women, identif~irlg at their Inose
rebellious with Satan, at their least with rebellious Eve, and almost
all the time with the Romantic poets, should have been similarly
obsessed with the apocalyptic social transformations a revision of
Milton might bring about. Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A I'indicalion
oS the Righls of Woman often reads like an outraged commentary on
Paradise Lo.tl, combined a Blakeian enthusiasm for the French Revolu-
tion-at least in its early days---with her "pre-Romantic" reverence
for the Satanic sublime and her feminist anger at Milton's misogyny.
But complicated as it was, that complex ofirlterrelated Itclings was
not hers alone. For not only have feminism and Romantic radicalism
been consciously associated in the minds of many women writers,
Byronically (and Satanically) rebellious visionary politics have often
been used by women as metaphorical disguises for sexual politics.
Thus in Shirleg Bronte not only creates an anti-n/liltonic Eve, she also
uses the revolutionary anger of tile frame-breaking workers wit)l
whom the novel is crucially concerned as an image for the fury of its
dispossessed heroines. Similarly, as Ellen Moers has noted, English-
women'ss factory novels (like Gaskell's Mary Rarlon) and Americarl
women's anti-slavery novels (like Stowe's Uncle rom's Cabin) sub-
merged or disguised "private, brooding, female resentment" in
ostensibly disinterested examinations of larger public issues."3 More
recently, even Virginia Woolf's arlgrily feminist 7hree GuzneaJ- purports
to have begun not primarily as a consideration of the woman questioll
hut as art almost Shelle);an dream of transforming the world
abolishing war, tyranny, ignorance, etc.-through the formation of
a female "Society ofOutsiders."
But of course such a society would be curiously Satanic, since in
the politics of paradise the Prince of Darkness was literally the first
Outsider. Even if Woolf herself did not see far enough past Milton's
bogey to recognize this, a number of other women, both feminists
and anti-feminists, did. In late nineteenth-century America, lor
instance, a well-known journal of Komantically r·adical politics artd
feminism was called Lucifer Ihv Lzghl-benrer, and in Victorian EnRlalld
Mrs. Rigby wrote of Charlotte Brontt;'s Byronic and feminist Jnne
Eyre that "the tone of mind arld thought which has overthrown
authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and
fostered Chartismand rebellion at home" -in other words, a Byronic,

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Promethean, Satanic, andJacobin tone ofmind--"is the same which
has also written Jane Lyre."""
Paradoxically, however, Brontij herself may have been less con-
scious of the extraordinary complex of visionary and revisionary
impulses that went into Jane Lyre than Mrs. Rigby was, at least in
part becaus;t, like many other women, she found her own anger and
its intellectual consequences almost too painful to confrontl Com-
menting on the so-called condition of women question, she told
Mrs. Gaskell that there are "evils--deep-rooted in the foundation
of the social system--which no efforts of ours can touch; of which
we cannot complain: of which it is advisable not too often to think."
Like Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, she evidently had moments in which
she saw "no friend in God---in Satan's host no foes."35 Still, despite
her refusal to "complain," BrontE's unwillingness to think of social
inequities was more likely a function of her anxiety about her own
rebelliously Satanic impulses than a sign of blind resignation to what
Yeats called "the injustice of the skiCs."3B
The relationship between women writers and Milton's curly-haired
Byronic hero is, ho~vever, even more complicated than we have so
far suggested. And in the intricate tangle of this relationship resides
still another reason for the refusal of writers like Bronte consciously to
confront their obsessive interest in the impulses incarnated in the
villain of Paradise Lost. For not only is Milton's Satan in certain
crucial ways very much like women, he is also (as we saw in connection
with Austen's glamorously Satanic anti-heroes) enormously attractive
to women. Indeed, both Eliot's phrase and Byron's biography imply
that he is in most ways the incarnation of worldly male sexuality,
fierce, powerful, experienced, simultaneously brutal and seductive,
devilish enough to overwhelm the body and yet enough a fallen
angel to charm the soul. As such, however, in his relations with
women he is a sort of Nietzschean Zibermensch, giving orders and
expecting homage to his "natural"that is, masculine superiority,
as if he were God's shadow self, the id of heaven, Satanically redupli-
eating the politics of paradise wherever he goes. And yet, wherever
he goes, women follow him, even when they refuse to follow the God
whose domination he parodies. As Sylvia Plath so famously noted,
"Every woman adores a Fascist, I The boot in the face, the brute I
Brute heart of a brute like you." Speaking of "Daddy," Plath was of

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course speaking also of Satan, "a man in black with a Mein Kampf`
look.""' And the masochistic phenomenon she described helps explain
the unspeakable, even unthinkable sense of sin that also caused women
like Woolf and Bronte to avert their eyes from their own Satanic
impulses. For if Eve is Sin's as well as Satan's double, then Satan is
to Eve what he is to Sin--both a lover and a daddy.

~cf~

That the Romantic fascination with incest derived in part from
Milton's portrayal of the Sin-Satan relationship may be true but is
in a sense beside the point here. That both women and Romantic
poets must have found at least an analog for their relationship to
each other in Satan's incestuous affair with Sin is, however, very
much to the point. Admiring, even adoring, Satan's Byronic re-
belliousness, his scorn of conventional virtues, his raging energ)·,
the woman writer may ha\e secretly fantasized that she was Satan
or Cain, or Manfred, or Prometheus. But at the same time her ftelinas
of female powerlessness manifested themselves in her conviction that
the closest she could really get to being Satan was to be his creature,
his tool, the witchlike daughter/mistress who sits at his right hand.
Leslie Marchand recounts a revealing anecdote about Mar): Shelle~'s
stepsister, Claire Clairmont, that brilliantly illuminates this move-
ment from self-assertive identification to masochistic self-denial.
Begging Byron to criticize her half-finished novel, rebellious Claire
(who was later to follow the poet to Geneva and bear his daughter
Allegra) is said to have explained that he must read the manuscript
because "the creator ought not to destro)· his creature.""s
Despite Bronte's vision of a Promethean Eve, even her Shirley
betrays a similar sense of the diff~culty of direct identification with
the assertive Satanic principle, and the need for women to accept
their own instrumentality, for her first ecstatic description of an active,
indomitable Eve is followed by a more chastened story. In this secorid
parable, the "first woman" passively wanders alone in an alienating
landscape, wondering whether she is "thus to burn out and peris2i,
her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed" even though
"the flame of her intelligence burn[s] so vivid" and "something
within her stir[s] disquieted." Instead of coming from that Promc-
thean fire within her, however, as the first Eve's salvation implicitly

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did, this Eva's redemption comes througli a Byronic/Satanic god of
the Night called "Genius," who claims her, a "lost atom of life," as
his bride. "I take from thy vision, darkness ... I, with my presence,
fill vacancy," he declares, explaining that "Unhumbled, I can take
what is mine. Did I not give from the altar the very flame which lit
Eva's being~"39 Superficially, this allegorical narrative may he seen
as a woman's attempt to imagine a male muse with whom she can
have a sexual interaction that will parallel the male poet's congress
with his female muse. But the incestuous Byronic love story in which
Brontii embodies her allegorical message is more significant here than
the message itself.
It suggests to begin with that, like Claire Clairemont, Bronte may
have seen herself as at best a creation of male "Genius"--whether
artwork or daughter is left deliberately vague--and therefore a being
ultimately lacking in autonomy. Finding her ideas astonishingly
close to those of an admired male (Byron, Satan, "Genius"), and
accustomed to assuming that male thought is the source of all female
thinking just as Adam's rib is the source of Eve's body, she supposes
that he has, as it were, invented her. In addition, her autonomy is
further denied even by the incestuous coupling which appears to
link her to her creator and to make them equals. For, as Helene
Moglen notes, the devouring ego of the Satanic-Byronic hero found
the fantasy (or reality) of incest the best strategy for metaphorically
annihilating the otherness-the autonomy--of the female. "In his
union with [his half-sister] Augusta Leigh," Moglen points out,
"Byron was in fact striving to achieve union with himself," just as
Manfred expresses his solipsistic self-absorption by indulging his
forbidden passion for his sister, Astarte. Similarly, the enormity of
Satan's ego is manifested in the sexual cycle of his solipsistic production
and reproduction of himself first as Sin and later as Death. Like
Byron, he seems to be "attempting to become purely self-dependent
by possessing his past in his present, affirming a more complete
identity by enveloping and containing his other, complementary self.
But, as Moglen goes on to remark, "to incorporate 'the other' is also
after all to negate it. No space remains for the female. She can either
allow herself to be devoured or she can retreat into isolation."""
It is not insignificant, then, that the fruit ofSatan's solipsistic union
with Sin is Death, just as death is the fruit of Manfred's love for

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Astarte and ultimately----as we shall see - of all the incestuous nco-
Satanic couplings envisioned by women writers from Mary Shelle~
to Sylvia Plath. To the extent that the desire to violate the incest
taboo is a desire to be self-sufficient-self-begetting-it is a divinel)
interdicted wish to be "as Gods," like the desire for the fbrbiddcn
fruit of the tree of knowledge, whose taste also meant death. For the
woman writer, moreover, even the reflection that the Byronic hero is
as much a creature of her mind--an incarnation of her "private,
brooding, female resentments"-as she is an invention of his, offers
little solace. For if in loving her he loves himself, in loving him she
loves herself, and is therefore similarly condemned to the death of
the soul that punishes solipsism.
But of course such a death of the soul is implied in any case by
Satan's conception of his unholy creatures: Sin, Death, and Eve.
As a figure of the heavenly interloper who plays the part of false
"cosmocrator" in the dualistic patriarchal cosmology Milton in-
herited from Christian tradition, Satan is in fact a sort of artist of
death, the paradigmatic master of all those perverse aesthetic tech-
niques that pleasure the body rather than the soul, and serve tile
world rather than God. From the golden palace he erects at Pan-
demonium to his angelic impersonations in the garden and the
devilish machines he engineers as part of his war against God, he
practices false, fleshly, death-devoted arts (though a few of them are
very much the kinds of arts a Romantic sensualist like Keats somc-
times admired). As if following Milton even here, Byron makes the
Satanic Manfred similarly the master of false, diabolical arts. And
defining herself as the "creature" ofone or the other of these irreligious
artists, the woman writer would be confirmed not only in her sense
that she was part of the "effeminate slackness" of the "false creation"
but also in her fear that she was herself a false creator, one of tile
seductive "bevy of fair women" for whom the arts of language, like
those of dance and music, are techniques "Bred only ... to tl~e
taste / Of lustful appetance," sinister parodies of the language of the
angels and the music of the spheres (PL 1 i. 618--19). In the shadowy
of such a fear, even her housewifely arts would begin, like Eve's
cookery--her choosing of delicacies "so contriv'd as not to mix I
Tastes" (PL 5. 334-35)--to seem suspect, while the poetry she
conceived might well appear to be a monster birth, like Satan's

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horrible child Death. Fallen like Anne Finch into domesticity, into
the "dull mannage of a servile house"41 as well as into the slavery of
generation, she would not even have the satisfaction Manfred has of
dying nobly. Rather, dwindling by degrees into an infertile drone,
she might well conclude that this image of Satan and Eve as the false
artists of creation was finally the most demeaning and discouraging
avatar of Milton's bogey.

~L~g

What would have made her perception of this last bogey even
more galling, of course, would have been the magisterial calm with
which Milton, as the epic speaker of Paradise Lost, continually calls
attention to his own art, for the express purpose, so it seems, of defining
himself throughout the poem as a type of the true artist, the virtuous
poet who, rather than merely delighting (like Eve and Satan), delights
while instructing. A prophet or priestly bard and therefore a guardian
of the sacred mysteries of patriarchy, he serenely proposes to justify
the ways of God to men, calls upon subservient female muses for the
assistance that is his due (and in real, life upon slavish daughters for
the same sort of assistance), and at the same time wars upon women
with a barrage of angry words, just as God wars upon Satan. Indeed,
as a figure of the true ariist, God's emissary and defender on earth,
Milton himself, as he appears in Paradise Lost, might well have seemed
to f`emale readers to be as much akin to God as they themselves were
to Satan, Eve, or Sin.
Like God, for instance, Milton-as-epic-speaker creates heaven and
earth (or their verbal equivalents) out of a bewildering chaos of
history, legend, and philosophy. Like God, he has mental powers
that penetrate to the furthest corners of the cosmos he has created, to
the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, soaring with "no middle
flight" toward ontological subjects "unattempted yet in Prose or
Rhyme" (PL 1. 16). Like God, too, he knows the consequence of
every action and event, his comments upon them indicating an almost
divine consciousness of the simultaneity of past, present, and future.
Like God, he punishes Satan, rebukes Adam and Eve, moves angels
from one battle station to another, and grants all mankind glimpses of
apocalyptic futurity, when a "greater Man" shall arrive to restore
Paradisal bliss. And like God--like the Redeemer, like the Creator,

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like the Holy Ghost --he is male. Indeed, as a male poet justifying the
ways of a male deity to male readers he rigorously excludes all
females from the heaven of his poem, except insof`ar as he can beget
new ideas upon their chaotic fecundity, like the Holy Spirit "brooding
on the vast Abyss" and making it pregnant (PL i. 21-22).
Even the blindness to which this epic speaker occasionally refers
makes him appear godlike rather than handicapped. Cutting him
off from "the cheerful ways" of ordinary mortals and reducing Satan's
and Eve's domain of material nature to "a universal blanc," it elevates
him above trivial fleshly concerns and causes "Celestial light" to
"shine inward" upon him so that, like Tiresias, Homer, and God, he
may see the mysteries of the spiritual world and "telllOf things
invisible to mortal sight" (PL 3. 55). And finally, even the syntax
in which he speaks of these "things invisible" seems somehow godlike.
Certainly the imposition of a Latinate sentence structure on English
suggests both supreme confidence and supreme power. Paradise Lost
is the "most remarkable Production of the world," Keats dryly
decided in one of his more anti-Miltonic moments, because of the
way its author forced a "northern dialect" to accommodate itself
"to·preek and latin inversions and intonations."42 But not only are
Grclck and Latin the quintcssential languages ol`masculine scholarshi~,
(as Virginia Woolf, for instance, never tired of noting), they are also
the languages of the Church, of patristic and patriarchal ritual and
theology. Imposed upon English, moreover, their periodic sentences,
perhaps more than any other stylistic device in Paradise Lost, flaunt
the poet's divine foreknowledge. When Milton begins a sentence
"Him the Almighty" the reader knows perfectly well that only the
poet and God know how the sentence--like the verse, the book,
and the epic of humanity itself---will come out in the end.
That the Romantics perceived, admired, and occasionally identi-
fied with Milton's bardlike godliness while at the same time identi-
fying with Satan's Promethean energy and fortitude is one of the
more understandable paradoxes of literary history. Though they
might s6metimes have been irreligious and radically visionary with
Satan, poets like Wordsworth and Shelley were after all funda-
mentally "masculinist" with Milton, even if they revered Mary
Wollstonecraft (as Shelley did) or praised Anne Finch (as Wordsworth
did). In this respect, their metaphors for the poet and "his" art are

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as revealing as Milton's. Both Wordsworth and (as we have seen)
Shelley conceive of the poet as a divine ruler, an "unacknowledged
legislator" in Shelley's famous phrase and "an upholder and pre-
server" in Wordsworth's more conservative words. As such a ruler,
a; sort of inspired patriarch, he is, like Milton, the guardian and
hierophant of sacred mysteries, inalterably opposed to the "idleness
and unmanly despair" of the false, effeminate creation. More, he is
a virile trumpet that calls mankind to hattle, a fiercely phallic sword
that consumes its scabbard, and--most Miltonic of alla godlike
"influence which is moved not, but moves," modeled upon Aristotle's
Unmoved Mover.43

No wonder then that, as Joseph Wittreich puts it, the author of
Paradise Lost was "the quintessence of everything the Romantics
most admired...the Knower moved by truth alone, the Doer...
causing divine deeds to issue forth from divine ideas, the Sayer who
translates the divine idea into poetry....Thus to know Milton was
to know the answers to the indistinguishable questions --What is a
poet? What is poetry?""q Virginia Woolf, living in a world where
the dead female poet who was "Judith Shakespeare" had laid aside
her body so many times, made the same point in dini·rent words:
"This is the essence of which almost all other poetry is the dilution."
Such an assertion might seem jubilant if made hy a man. But the
proteau shadow of Milton's bogey seems to darken the page as
Woolf writes.

[667]

Notes to Chapter 6:

Epigraphs: Sonnet XXXI, "Sonnets From a Lock Box," in Louise Bernikow, ed.,
7he World Splil Open: p. 246; Sonnet: "In our content, before the autumn came,"
in 7hp World Split Oppn, p. 284; BeP jTi'me Vine (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953), p. 263;"The Old Chevalier," SPven Gothic TTales (New York: Modern
Library, 1934), p. 88.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Orun, p. 1 18.
2 0,1 p. 7 of A Room Woolf recounts an incident involving the MS of "I,ycidas."
On p. 39 she refers to "the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which
Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration."
3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 35. The OED gives three meanings

[668]

x "Miton's invocation to that heavenly muse, who on the 'secret top of Oreb or
Sinai' had taught the Hebrew shepherd how in the womb of chaos, the conception
of a world had originated and ripened." In connection with our earlier argument
about the metaphor of literary paternity, it seems significant here that Bronte.
emphasizes the female creative powers of Milton's muse, calling attention to
his images of conception rather than his images of generation and alluding to
the authority of the maternal womb rather than that oi the paternal "Idea."
16. William Blake, Milton, book 2, plate 39, lines 40-42.
Ed See Stanley Fish, SurpricCd by Sin (New York: St. Martin's, 1967), pp. 24953.
17. See de Beauvoir, rhp Second Sex, especially chap. 17, "The Mother."
18. In a letter to Sandra Gilbert, however Ross Woodhouse has argued interestingly
that Urania offers Milton a "matrrarchaa dictation" and thus a sketchy possibility
orandrogyny. W, are indebted to him for calling her significance to our attention.
19. See "On the Character of. Milton's Eve," in 7~~ Complete WorAs of William
H~Tlirr, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930-34), 4:105-11. For another discussion
orthe parallels between Eve and Sin, see William Empson, "Milton and Bentley,"
in Some Versions of Pastoral (NeW York: New Directions, 1950), pp. 172-78.
Commenting on Milton's "Eve-baiting," Empson also notes that "Eve... has
cv'led hair, modest but 'requiring, that clutches at Adam like the tendrils of
~ vine. Eve now then is herself the forbidden tree; the whole face of Hell has
~ome identical with her face; it is filled, as by the mockery of the temptress,
rrith her hair that entangled him; a~l the beauty of nature, through her, is a
;~~C~i~lislike hers, for moral deformity. But at least now we have exposed her;
corpse worms; she is the bitter apple of her own crime, kind as the
Eumenides" (pp. 176-77).

-~~' OT course the negative trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death parodies the "officiai"

Holy Trinity ofCod~ Christ, and the Holy Ghost. But, as Pnradisr Losl is structured,
~dam does seem to participate in another, patriarchal trinity along with God

and Christ, while Eve belongs metaphorically to a trinity with Satan and Sin.
.nO Robert Graves, 7he WhilpGoddpsr (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948). Graves's
arndcrstanding of the specific inff uence this misogynistic tradition had upon ~rohn
Jlil~on--and especially upon Milton's relationships with women--is clearly
articulated in his Wife to ;Z~t·. Millonl 7he Story of Marie PoLuell (New York:
Crcarive Age Press, 1944).
1Milton, book I, plate 2, lines 19-20. Joseph Wittreich notes that "Ololon is the
'~rilual form of Milton's sixTold emanation, the truth underlying his errors
'hOU' women. Milton's three wives and three daughters- all ofwhom, according
" Blake, Milton treated abusively--constitute his emanation." (Joseph Antony
Wittreich, Jr., ed., The Romantics on Milton. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western
Reserve University, 1970], p~ 99.) Discussing Blake's view of Milton, Northrop
Frye observes that "one is struck by the fact that Milton never sees beyond this
""'Jtcr Lfemale will. His vision of women takes in only the hostility and fear
·hirh it is quite right to assume toward the temptress_ but which is by no
rrclns the only way in which women can be visualized." (Northrop Frye,
Fearful Symmetry r A Study of William Blake [Boston: Beacon. 1962], p. 352.) Along

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"Milton's invocation to that heavenly muse, who on the 'secret top of Oreb or
Sinai' had taught the Hebrew shepherd how in the womb ofchaos, the conception
oTa world had originated and ripened." In connection with our earlier argument
about the metaphor ofliterary paternity, it seems significant here that Brontl;
emphasizes the Female creative powers of Milton's muse, calling attention to
his images of conception rather than his images of generation and alluding to
the authority of the maternal womb rather than that dF the paternal "Idea."
OS \Villiam Blake, Millon, book 2, plate 39, lines 40-42.
Ir, See Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (New York: St. Martin s, 1967), pp. 249-53.
93 See de Beauvoir, 7he Second Sex, especially chap. 17, "The Mother."
18 In a letter to Sandra Cil bert, however, Ross Woodhouse has argued interestingly
that Urania offers Milton a "matriarchal dictation" and thus a sketchy possibility
oCandrogyny. We are indebted to him For calling her significance to our attention.
19 See "On the Character of Milton's Eve," in Ihp Complete Works of M/illiam
Hylill, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1930-34), 4: 105-11. For another discussion
oFthe parallels between Eve and Sin, see William Empson, "Milton and Bentley,"
in Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1950), pp. 172-78.
(~mmenting on Milton's "Eve-baiting," Empson also notes that "Eve... has
curled hair, modest but 'requiring, that clutches at Adam like the tendrils of
1 vine. Eve now then is herself the forbidden tree; the whole face of Hell has
b~ome identical with her Face; it is filled, as by the mockery of the temptress,
*ilh her hair that entangled him; all the beauty of nature, through her, is a
~d\·eiing, like hers, for moral deformity. But at least now we have exposed her;
her hair is corpse worms; she is the bitter apple of her own crime, kind as the
Eumenides" (pp. 176-77).
?~I OF course the negative trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death parodies the "official"
Hol!· Trinity of God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. But, as Paradise Lo.rl is structured,
~dam does seem to participate in another, patriarchal trinity along with God
and Christ, while Eve belongs metaphorically to a trinity with Satan and Sin.
nll Rohcrt Graves, 7hr While GoddeJs (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948).Graves's
understanding of the specific influence this misogynistic tradition had upon John
~lillon---and especially upon Milton's relationships with women--is clearly
articulated in his Wife to Mr. MiNonl lhe Story of Marie Powell (New York:
Creative Age Press, 1944).
" Jlillon, book I, plate 2, lines 19-20. Joseph Wittreich notes that "Ololon is the
Ipirilual form of Milton's sixfold emanation, the truth underlying his errors
r~ul women. Milton's three wives and three daughters--all ofwhom, according
a,Blake, Milton treated abusively-constitute his emanation." (Joseph Antony
~virrreich,Jr., ed., 7he Romantics on Millon [Cieveland: The Press of Case Western
Rc~n·e University, 1970], p. 99.) Discussing Blake's view of Milton, Northrop
mcobserves that "one is struck by the fact that Milton never sees beyond this
trnirrcr'female will. His vision of women takes in only the hostility and fear
·hich it is quite right to assume toward the temptress ... but which is by no
rnclnr the only way in which women can be visualized." (Northrop Frye,
f~njul Symmetry: A Study of M/illiam Blake [Boston: Beacon, 1962], p. 352.) Along

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the same lines, Wittreich also comments in his recent Angel ~f Apoca!vpsr that
"Blake's point Iin Milton] is [that] ... because Milton exhibits contempt For
this world, precisely because he donned the robes of chastity, holding his soul
distinct From his body, he remained isolated, For most of his life, from the divine
vision." However "Milton's doctrine of chastity, which had oppressed him, his
wives, and his daughters, is, in his moment of triumph, overcome, Milton anni-
hilating the tyranny of the law (Urizen), one of whose tyrannies is 'the Chain
of Jealousy' that binds Ore.'' ( Angel of Apocalypse : Blake's Idea of Millon [ Madison :
University of Wisconsin Press, 1975], pp. 37 and 247.)
23 Milton, book 2, plate 41, lines 30, 32-33, 35-36.
24 Blake, 7he Marriage oSHPaum and Hell, plate 6.
25 Bloom, Ihe Anxiety oJlnJluence, p. 23.
26 See Shelley, Promethre.s linbound, 3. 1. 57, and Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
canto 1, stania 6. For a further elaboration of this point, see Mario Prat, "The
Metamorphoses of Satan," Ihe Romantic Agony, pp. 55-94. On Satan as a hand-
some devil, moreover, cf. Baudelaire's remark that "le plus parFait type de BeautC
virile est Satan--g ia mani~re de Milton" (Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, quoted
by Prat, p. 53).
27 In this connection, Frye relates the explosive imagery of Eve's dream-Right
both to the volcanic rehelliousness oFthe enchained Titans and to the Gunpowder
Plot. See "The Revelation to Eve," p. 24.
28 Byron to Moore, 19 September 182l,quoted in Byron, Selected Works, ed. Edward
E. Bostetter (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), editor's Footnote,
p. 'L85.
29 Mary Wollstonrcraft, A C'indicalion oJthe Rights of Uloman, ed. Carol H. Poston
(New York: Norton, 1975), note by Wollstonecraft, p. 25.
30 Blake, Milton, book 2, plate 40, lines 29-31.
31 Shelley, Promcthcus Cinbound, 4:578.
32 "Snake," 7he Complete Forms of D. H. LarurPncP, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and
Warren Roberts (New York: Viking, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 34951.
33 Ellen Moers, Literary M/omm, p. 19.
34 Review of Jane Eyre, Quarterly RPvieu, 84 (December 1848):17374. Notably
clear statements of the connection between visionary Feminist politics and
theology, especially Genesis (one of Milton's major sources, after all), may also
be found in 7he M/oman's Bible (first pub. 1895; reprinted as Iht· Original Feminist
Attack on the Bible (New York: Arno Press, 1974]), csp. pp. 23-27.
35 I,ctter of 27 August, 1850, quoted in Mrs. Gaskell, ?~he Life of Charlotte Bronti
(New York: Everyman, 1974), p. 313; "Doubt," Poems of Mary E. ColeridRe,
p. 40; see also Coleridge's "The Devil's Funeral," Poems, pp. 32-33.
36 W. B. Yeats, "The Cold Heaven," Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (New
York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 122-23.
37 "Daddy," Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1966!, pp. 50-51.
38 Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1957), vol. 2, p. 591.
39 See Shirley, chap. 27.
40 Helene Moglen, Charlotte Bronter 7he Self Conceived (New York: Norton, 1976),
p. 32.

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41 "l`he Introduction," 7he Porm.r o/' nnnP Cotrntr.rs ~f Winrhilsta, pp. I- 6.
42 Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 24 September 181Y, quoted in Wittreich,
7hr Romantics on Milton, p. 562.
43 See Wordsworth, Preface to I,vrical Rallad.s, and Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry."
44 Wittreich, Thp Romantics on Millon, p. 12. A small but striking instance of Milton's
role as paradigmatic Poet (and perhaps as "great Inhibitor") occurs in the
first draFt of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's A Vision of Poets." Barrett Browning's

original list oF the greatest poets of all time began as Follows (we have bracketed
cancelled phrases):

Here's Homer with the broad suspence (sie)
[~I`hat face was Homer's by the sign]
Of thundrous brows,--lips [infantine] intense
CVith garrulous god-innocence---
Here, Milton--piercingly if blind
His eyes the world to find
The Light of light in heights of mind.
Here Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb
The crowns of the worldOh eyes sublime
With tears and laughter For all time.

Evidently, before she thought of Shakespeare (though after she thought of
Homer), Barrett Browning thought of Milton as a kind of primordial poet.
She seems to have had unusual trouble in composing her encomium to him,
however, and significantly, in revising the manuscript she excised this relerence;
in the final version of "A Vision of Poets" Shakespeare Follows Homer, and
Milton is not mentioned until almost a hundred lines later, as if E. B. B. were
trying to put him in his proper place. (The lines quoted above are From the
holograph MS in the Berg Collection oF the New York Public Library. See
also "A Vision of Poets" in 7hp Poetical Works ~ Elirabplh Barrrll Brou,nin~,
pp. 247-60.)