Mourning Eve, Mourning Milton in Paradise Lost
Hodgson, Elizabeth M. A.
Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May, 2005)
Abstract
Hamlet’s mourning black seems to be a form of armour which Milton’s poetic personae prefer to wear. In works from “Lycidas” to Samson Agonistes, the potency of grief, disillusionment, and loss is fundamental to Milton’s literary self-fashionings. In his prose texts and his poetry, the Miltonic speaker is often isolated, deprived, sorrowful, in mourning over the slaughter of the Waldensians, the loss of England’s religious supremacy, the death of a college friend, the surrender of the people to wantonness, the betrayal of divine principles, or the failure of the Revolution (1). This literary mourner, gathering up the parts of Truth or questioning the water-nymphs or recounting the death of “mother with infant,” creates for himself the righteousness of grief and the right to protest, and these two “rights” are Milton’s primary goal. What is both fascinating and culturally ambiguous about this pattern of turning grief into judgement is how clearly the Miltonic text also responds to the gendered ideology of grief in post-Reformation England. This is manifest in the many moments in which his self-authorizing sorrow shifts from resisting to invoking tears as “women’s weapons” as he associates or distances his own grief with or from prophetic, deified, or prescient women-mourners. This particular nexus of grief, women, and the poetic prophet is a tool with cultural connections which explain the double-edged ambivalences of Miltonic self-fashioning in Paradise Lost.
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