Queer Milton

333 Pages·2018·4.345 MB·English

by  David L. Orvis

Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500-1700
QUEER
MILTON
Edited by DAVID L. ORVIS
Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
Series Editors
Jean Howard
Department of English
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
Ivo Kamps
General
University of Mississippi
University, MS, USA
In the twenty first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiogra-
phy and cultural studies have become intimately interwoven, and the for-
merly distinct fields of literature, society, history, and culture no longer
seem so discrete. The Early Modern Cultural Studies series encourages
scholarship that crosses boundaries between disciplines, time periods,
nations, and theoretical orientations. The series assumes that the early
modern period was marked by incipient processes of transculturation
brought about through exploration, trade, colonization, and the migra-
tion of texts and people. These phenomena set in motion the processes of
globalization that remain in force today. The purpose of this series is to
publish innovative scholarship that is attentive to the complexity of this
early modern world and bold in the methods it employs for studying it.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14956
David L. Orvis
Editor
Queer Milton
Editor
David L. Orvis
Boone, NC, USA
Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
ISBN 978-3-319-97048-6 ISBN 978-3-319-97049-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97049-3
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P
reface
This project began as a special issue of Early Modern Culture co-edited
with Will Stockton. Our aim in that 2014 volume was to challenge what
we perceived then as the critical and theoretical orthodoxy of much
Milton criticism, particularly its resistance to the kinds of queer interpre-
tive frameworks that have elsewhere animated and enriched Renaissance
studies. Indebted to pioneering anti-heteronormative readings of Milton,
emboldened by the rise of the New Milton Criticism, “Queer Milton”
sought to extend previous lines of inquiry into the unstable forma-
tions of gender and sexuality in Milton’s corpus.1 In “An Introduction
Justifying Queer Ways,” Stockton notes that the collected essays
“demonstrate particular analytical purchases the concept of queerness
can make on just some recurrent questions in Milton Studies.” These
questions in turn raise others: “Is Milton’s Christianity hostile to queer
expression? Is it the task of the critic to make Milton’s work ideologically
coherent? And why has Milton Studies been so far relatively unaffected
by the queer turn in Early Modern (especially Shakespeare) Studies?”2
Attributing the dearth of queer interventions in Milton criticism to its
perceived insularity as a field, Stockton concludes, “Whether Milton
Studies remains such a divided place depends in part on whether it can
accommodate the queers.”3
Contributors to the special issue were given no guidance beyond our
general topic and title. Much to our delight, contributions examined a
range of works from a variety of queer perspectives. In the lead essay,
the first and only on Paradise Lost, Stephen Guy-Bray locates Milton’s
v
vi PREfACE
queerness in the angelic sodomy that precedes and surpasses human sex-
uality. David Orvis’s essay, the second in the volume, posits a conceptu-
alization of queer mutuality forged against hegemonic institutions in The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. If Guy-Bray and Orvis read queerness
in positive, even radical terms, then a second pair of essays by Melissa
Sanchez and Drew Daniel explore aversions to queer in other works by
Milton. Sanchez focuses on chastity and the flight from rationality in A
Mask, Daniel on effeminacy and the negative affects of shame and anx-
iety in Samson Agonistes. The issue concludes with Victoria Silver’s elo-
quent response, “An Apology for Queering Milton,” which enjoins us to
rethink Miltonic notions of embodiment. Tracking Milton’s ponderings
over creatural life and embodied experience across a wide array of polem-
ical works, including De Doctrina Christiana, Silver maps out a persis-
tent concern with the relation between self and body:
for Milton, selem elohim not only emphasizes the legitimacy of scriptural
anthropomorphism, which we cannot controvert, but also the dignity of the
human being, including the human body, to whose order of creatural exist-
ence its creator adapts his words, and enfolds his nature in the incarnation.
In short, for Milton, scripture’s way of speaking shows us how, miracles hav-
ing ceased, to find God in the world, which is neither by confining signifi-
cance to the superficial or ostensible sense of things, nor by denying their
embodied, circumstantial force in favor of a wholesale metaphysical transla-
tion. If I may put it this way, God is always an implication of experience, as
Milton explains in the first pages of Christian Doctrine, within phenomena
but never the same as them, owing to the insuperable distinction between
creature and creator, the caused and the causeless, finite and infinite.4
In addition to providing further grounds for pursuing anti-heteronormative
readings of Milton, these essays exemplify just a few possible trajectories for
future queer Milton criticism.
If our framing of the “Queer Milton” special issue reflected (at least
on the editors’ part) a degree of apprehension about its likely reception
among Miltonists, the present collection appears largely in response to
the generous and generally positive feedback that issue elicited. Upon
receiving the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Award, my
co-editor and I started to discuss in earnest what a book-length incar-
nation of this project might look like. This book represents the fruits
of those discussions, and I cannot thank Will Stockton enough for his
support in this latest endeavor and, of course, for agreeing to write the
PREfACE vii
afterword. In an effort to widen the scope of queer Milton studies, this
volume comprises seven original essays as well as revised and refined
versions of those that first appeared in the 2014 issue of Early Modern
Culture. following Erin Murphy’s edifying foray into the queer Milton
criticism that never happened, Queer Milton’s contents fall into two per-
haps overly broad categories—Part I on “Eroticism and form,” Part II
on “Temporality and Affect”—in recognition of queer studies’ consti-
tutive messiness. Each essay understands queerness in its own way, and
as Stockton notes in the book’s afterword, the cumulative effect is not
some grand narrative about a so-called queer author, but a multiplicity
of queer readings, each producing their own queer Milton. Even so, the
collection’s organization announces in rather general terms some recur-
rent conceptual fields under investigation here. Essays in Part I share an
interest in erotic form—which is to say, forms of erotic entanglement and
attachment and the literary and textual forms through which they find
expression. If such concerns find their way into the book’s latter half,
essays in Part II nonetheless command a shift in focus toward consid-
erations of temporality and affect in normative regimes of gender and
sexuality. There is significant potential for overlap here, and one might
notice the well-worn terrain of Paradise Lost in both the opening chap-
ter of Part I and the concluding chapter of Part II. This same distance,
however, transports from seemingly familiar territory in queer reading
practices (Luxon) to a hitherto unexplored geology of exhausted life
(Swarbrick). But, of course, not everyone will follow this path through
the book, and different roadmaps can afford us different views of its
queer landscape.
Thus loosely defined, Queer Milton’s organizing principles suggest
a few of the book’s engagements with recent conversations in Milton
studies and in queer early modern studies. Heeding Catharine Gray
and Erin Murphy’s call “for a more porous Miltonism,” the present
collection exploits the terminological indeterminacy of queer to gather
methodologically diverse essays.5 Interpretive frameworks for queering
temporality and affect are especially varied, incorporating insights from
wide-ranging theoretical works to elucidate, in this section’s four chap-
ters, chastity and chronopolitics in A Mask (Sanchez), communal shame
and national identity in Paradise Lost (Pivetti), effeminacy and terror in
Samson Agonistes (Daniel), and the exhaustion of bodies and tropes in
Paradise Lost (Swarbrick). As in Gray and Murphy’s Milton Now, con-
tributions to Queer Milton “guide the direction of the collection in
viii PREfACE
divergent and productively conflicted ways.”6 Whereas Guy-Bray exam-
ines angelic intimacy alongside early modern discourses of sodomy and
masculine friendship, Orvis explores articulations of intimacy that are
legible as queer precisely in their defiance of institutional forms such as
friendship and marriage. Together, the essays provoke questions about
the queerness of early modern discursive formations, and hence, too,
about the proximity of queer to antinormativity.7 In her ruminations
about the state of the field, Murphy takes up Orvis’s reading of Milton’s
deployment of Anteros in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to
show what is lost in his “reparative” approach (to quote Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick). Offering her own “paranoid” reading of allusions to Anteros,
Murphy amply demonstrates not the superiority of one queer herme-
neutic over the other, but rather the crucial importance of both ways of
reading in a more robust queer Milton criticism.
The present collection seeks to build on previous anti-heteronor-
mative Milton scholarship while also delineating new areas of inquiry.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, several chapters pick up threads of germinal
queer and feminist readings of Paradise Lost. One such thread is the sta-
tus of pre- and postlapsarian human sexuality and marriage embodied in
Adam and Eve. In addition to enlarging the range of sources, both bib-
lical and extra-biblical, for Milton’s representation of sex and compan-
ionship prior to and after the fall, queer critiques have questioned the
normativity, and indeed the primacy, of Adam and Eve’s encounters in
Eden.8 In Thomas Luxon’s contribution to Queer Milton, the Genesis
account of creation is revealed as a kind of supplement to the Edenic
pre-beginnings imagined in Paradise Lost. The pre-first elements of
Milton’s Eden posit a queer poetics that destabilizes biblical orthodoxy,
particularly when it comes to the poem’s treatment of marriage and sex-
ual difference. Kyle Pivetti examines shame and memory in Milton’s
epic, arguing that when Adam and Eve consume the forbidden fruit,
they enter into time divided between pre- and postlapsarian. founded
on and structured by shameful memories and communal shame, this
entrance provides the conditions for a national identity constructed
around narratives of misogyny, difference, and marriage. If Luxon and
Pivetti stop short of Will Stockton’s declaration, in an essay published in
Queer Renaissance Historiography, that, in Lacanian terms at least, heter-
osexuality fails in Paradise Lost, they nevertheless problematize in quite
different ways the hegemonic status of marriage and heteroeroticism in
Milton’s epic.9
PREfACE ix
Other chapters in the book revisit discussions of angelic intimacy in
Paradise Lost. Mounting an important corrective to studies that view
Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian sexuality as a conjugal ideal, path-break-
ing queer analyses of sex between angels have placed this dynamic at the
center of Milton’s cosmic order.10 As mentioned above, Guy-Bray draws
on overlapping Renaissance discourses of sodomy and friendship to
unpack depictions of celestial union in Paradise Lost. In Guy-Bray’s read-
ing, this non-reproductive and ungendered angelic love is the poem’s
paradigmatic sexuality—one which humans can only ever aspire to and
imitate. Lara Dodds relates Adam and Raphael’s conversation about
angelic sexuality in Book 8 of Paradise Lost to two late-twentieth-century
works—Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series and Raphael Carter’s
cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall—to illustrate just some of the pos-
sibilities for fantasy and science fiction as genres of queer adaptation. In
the book’s only chapter devoted to Milton after Milton, Dodds expertly
weighs the costs and benefits of queer appropriation for genres and texts
beyond the early modern cultural imaginary. Despite their disparate
contexts, then, Guy-Bray and Dodds share an interest in increasing our
understanding of sexual knowledge derived from Adam and Raphael’s
colloquy in Paradise Lost.
Elsewhere in the volume, contributors engage queer work on other
selections from Milton’s poetry and prose. Sanchez’s investigation of
chronopolitics and the idealization of chastity in A Mask intervenes in
feminist and queer debates about the poem’s representation of sexuality
and desire.11 John Garrison’s exploration of abundance and attraction in
the elegies thinks anew the queer, or more specifically homoerotic, res-
onances of Milton’s Latin and English elegaic verse.12 Orvis’s contribu-
tion situates itself within discussions about the sexual politics of Milton’s
divorce tracts.13 And, of course, Murphy’s review of previous queer work
surveys a range of verse and prose compositions by Milton. far from
exhaustive, these chapters propose new approaches to texts that have
elicited queer responses in Milton scholarship.
Though not always explicit, essays in the present collection endeavor
to bring queer Milton studies into greater conversation with queer early
modern studies. Indeed, several essays are informed by ongoing debates
about the place of historicism in queer scholarship.14 Corey McEleney
concludes his chapter on queer disfigurations in Paradise Lost with a
defense of deconstructive modes of queer analysis. Responding chiefly
to Valerie Traub’s critiques of the rhetorical comparisons queer theorists