van den Berg, Sara.
"Women, Children, and the Rhetoric of Milton’s Divorce Tracts". Early
Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (May, 2004): 4.1-13<URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/10-1/bergmilt.htm>.
Milton’s divorce tracts—the two versions of Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce, The Judgment of Martin Bucer, Tetrachordon, and
Colasterion—make the claim that marriage between unsuited or spiritually
incompatible people is no marriage at all, and that in such cases both historical
tradition and Biblical precept sanction divorce, “especially if there be no
children, and that there be mutuall consent” (YP 2.242). The laws prohibiting
divorce in all but a few cases were, he wrote, oppressive: “For no effect
of tyranny can sit more heavy on the Common-wealth, then this household unhappiness
on the family” (YP 2.229). Milton’s arguments were rejected by his
contemporaries, and he has often accused of arguing for marital reform only
because of his own unhappy marriage and separation from Mary Powell. Many
commentators, most recently Annabel Patterson and Stephen Fallon, have remarked
on Milton’s thinly-veiled autobiographical vignettes in The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce (Patterson, 1990; Fallon, 2000). Few readers, however, have commented
on Milton’s use of metaphors, especially those of motherhood and childhood.
It is only in Colasterion that he adopts vituperative rhetoric, using
the negative metaphor of “childishness” and grotesque images of the body to
mock his anonymous critic. In this essay, I want to propose that vignette,
metaphor, and vituperation are three related rhetorical strategies in Milton’s
divorce tracts, and that together these strategies augment his rational argument
with indirect and direct passionate feeling about women and children at a
time when, separated from Mary Powell, he had to contemplate remaining childless.
Although Milton’s overt argument emphasizes that companionship, peace and
solace are the goals of marriage, with “generation . . . but a secondary end
in dignity, though not in necessitie” (YP 2.235), he returns to the
question of children throughout his tracts, both in pragmatic terms and in
metaphors.
There are several well-known vignettes of unhappy marriage in The Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce. Near the beginning of his tract, Milton summarizes
marital unhappiness this way:
If any two be but once handed in the Church, and have tasted
in any sort the nuptial bed, let them find themselves never so mistak’n
in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure, that
through their different tempers, thoughts, and constitutions, they can neither
be to one another a remedy against loneliness, nor live in any union or
contentment all their dayes, yet they shall…be made, spite of antipathy
to fadge together, and combine as they may to their unspeakable wearisomnes
and despaire. (YP 2:235-6)
As so often in this tract, which was written “for the good of both sexes,”
Milton focuses on mutual unhappiness and mutual failure, rather than merely
blaming women. In a later vignette, more closely linked to his own relationship
to Mary Powell, Milton invites sympathy more for the husband than for the
wife:
The sobrest and best govern’d men are least practiz’d in these
affaires; and who knows not that the bashful muteness of a virgin may oft-times
hide all the unlivelines and naturall sloth which is really unfit for conversation…[M]any
whohave spent their youth chastly, are in some things not so quick-sighted,
while they hast too eagerly to light the nuptiall torch. (YP 2:249)
Two chapters later, Milton is even more hostile toward wives in describing
the bitter disappointment of a man who “spent his youth unblamably, and layd
up his chiefest earthly comforts in the enjoyment of a contented mariage,”
only to “find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or,
as it oft happens, to an image of earth and fleam [phlegm]” (YP 2.254).
Such a man, however virtuous, may join “the lump of men” and women who are
driven to “that melancholy despair which we see in many wedded persons, though
they understand it not, or pretend other causes, because they know no remedy”
(YP 2.254).
Milton’s marital experience underlies his reinterpretation of at least two
Biblical passages, which in his telling become additional vignettes. Early
in the tract, Milton cites the story of Jephthah, who “could not but oblige
his conscience to be the sacrificer, or if not, the jailor of his innocent
and only daughter” (YP 2.235). Jephthah, misunderstanding the worship
of God, kills (or by some Puritan readings confines) his beloved daughter.
Milton identifies with Jephthah, not with the daughter, in privileging conscience.
Yet by arguing that Jephthah misread the Law, or rather that he mistook his
own vow as the Law, Milton treats this episode as a situation in which a daughter
was needlessly harmed. The second Biblical citation, late in the tract, offers
another instance of Milton’s reinterpretation of Hebrew and Covenant Law.
This instance seems more closely linked to his own marital situation, and
can even be read as a kind of defense of Mary Powell. In arguing that “fornication”
can mean something other than physical infidelity, Milton cites an incident
that calls to mind Mary Powell’s return to her father’s house. The passage
is taken from the Book of Judges, “where the Levites wife is said to
have plaid the whoor against him; which Josephus and the Septuagint,
with the Chaldean, interpret onely of stubbornesse and rebellion against
her husband…And this I shall contribute, that had it been whoordom, she would
have chosen any other place to run to, then to her fathers house, it being
so infamous for an Hebrew woman to play the harlot, and so opprobrious to
the parents” (YP 2.337). Milton goes on to cite John 8:3-11, in which
“our Saviour chose to use the word fornication, which word is found
to signify other matrimonial transgressions. . .besides actual adultery” (YP
2.337). By interpreting the word “fornication” in the largest sense, Milton
tries to argue that the grounds of divorce should be expanded to include more
than physical infidelity. In personal terms, Milton’s expanded definition
of fornication would seem to set up desertion as grounds for divorce. He
is not so much defending Mary Powell, then, but rather finding a way to label
her behavior.
Milton’s personal circumstances may color these vignettes and Biblical interpretations,
but are subordinate to his rational argument about general circumstances and
the Law. I want to suggest that the metaphoric register of the text conveys
a deeper sense of his pain and disappointment. The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce is saturated with metaphorical references to women’s behavior,
be it motherhood or prostitution. These references, I submit, set up a negative
and positive grid designed as an emotional substratum of Milton’s argument.
We read of “the teeming womb of Truth”, on the one hand, and Error as a Spenserian
monstrous mother on the other (YP 2.224). Custom, like Error, is
a bad mother, nursing society (her young) with the bad milk of cultural junk
food, “easie. . .to take and swallow down at pleasure; which proving but of
bad nourishment in the concoction, as it was heedlesse in the devouring, puffs
up unhealthily, a certain big face of pretended learning” (YP 2.222-3).
Such men are “the brood of Belial, the draffe of men,” who will learn to their
sorrow, he thunders, “that honest liberty is the greatest foe to dishonest
license” (YP 2.225).
Against Custom and Error Milton sets Truth and her teeming womb of ideas,
but he gives her a problematic history:
Though this ill hap wait on her nativity, that shee never comes
into the world, but like a Bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought
her forth: till Time the Midwife rather then the mother of Truth, have washt
and salted the Infant, declar’d her legitimat, and Churcht the father of
his young Minerva, from the needlesse causes of his purgation. (YP
2.225)
Truth is the child of a single speaker, and can therefore be called “bastard.”
Later in the tract, Milton returns to this image of Truth as a bastard:
[M]any truths now of reverend esteem and credit, had their birth
and beginning once from singular and private thoughts. . . yet Truth in
some age or other will find her witness, and shall be justify’d at last
by her own children” (YP 2.241).
Milton seems to admit that his argument originated in his own circumstances,
but that Time will wash and salt his Truth, purifying it of contaminating
self-interest. Milton, like Zeus to Minerva, serves as mother/father of Truth—a
mixing of gender that Stephen Fallon finds so common in Milton as to be a
kind of marker of his thought (Fallon, 224). Milton sets the metaphor of Truth
in the context of England, figured as good mother “teaching nations how to
live” (YP 2.232), and the English language, figured as child of Truth.
He will end his tract, however, with a metaphor of his world as a fallen woman,
isolating himself like a prophet who condemns “the prostitute loosenes of
the times” (YP 2.355). Most important is the chain of parents and children
that Milton sets up in his metaphorical narrative of Truth. Although one goal
of his tract is to argue that the purpose of marriage is not procreation but
mutual companionship, the fantasy of being “justify’d at last” by one’s children
suggests that Milton understood at least one of the common motives for wanting
children.
In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, he turns from metaphor
to direct reference when he concludes that divorce should be a private act,
requiring only that a husband avow that continuing the marriage would not
serve “the good of husband, wife, or childern” (YP 2.353). In Chapter
XIX, he argues that a discreet divorce is preferable to a public proceeding
for an honorable woman, so long as she is “not illiberally dealt with” (YP
2.348). He then offers this summary of her interests: “[F]or if she consent,
wherin has the law to right her? or consent not, then is it either just and
so deserv’d, or if unjust, such in all likelihood was the divorcer, and to
part from an unjust man is a happiness, & no injury to be lamented” (YP
2.349). Because Milton was arguing for divorce with the right to remarry,
he looks forward as well, arguing for the rights and status of subsequent
children:
[A]nd why should we not think them more holy then the offspring
of a former ill-twisted wedlock, begott’n only out of a bestiall necessitie
without any true love or contentment, or joy to their parents, so that in
some sense we may call them the Childern of Wrath and anguish, which
will as little conduce to the sanctifying as if they had been bastards (YP
2.259-60)
As the offspring of marriage, children should properly be the sign of its
Truth. The children of an unhappy marriage are the sign rather of its falsity.
In Tetrachordon, Milton is not concerned with metaphors and signs
but solely with the real circumstances of people who are governed by Biblical
precept. He abandons metaphor in order to gloss the Biblical texts that were
foundational to Jewish and Christian marital law. He glosses Genesis 1.28
early in Tetrachordon, arguing that “the desire of children is honest and
pious . . . which desire perhaps was a cause why the Jews hardly could endure
a barren wedlock” (YP 2.593). Indeed, he sympathizes with the plight
of childless men of affairs:
But to dismisse a wife only for barrenness, is hard: and yet
in som the desire of children is so great, and so just, yea somtime so necessary,
that to condemn such a one to a childless age, the fault apparently not
being in him, might seem perhaps more strict then needed (YP 2.594)
Milton took care for the children of a first marriage. Indeed, in Tetrachordon,
and even in The Judgment of Martin Bucer, he tries to defend their
interests. When there are children, he argues, an unhappy marriage does special
harm. The evil of an unhappy marriage “unavoidably will redound upon the
children”: “It degenerates and disorders the best spirits, leaves them to
unsettl’d imaginations, and degraded hopes, careless of themselves” (YP
2.632). Glossing Deuteronomy 24.1-2, the Hebrew law of divorce, Milton
asks “what love can ther bee to the unfortunat issue” of a “house of wrath”:
God therefore knowing how unhappy it would bee for children to
bee born in such a family, gives this Law either as a prevention, that being
an unhappy pair, they should not adde to bee unhappy parents, or els as
a remedy that if ther be children, while they are fewest, they may follow
either parent, as shall bee agreed, or judg’d, from the house of hatred
and discord, to a place of more holy and peaceable education” (YP 2.631).
Later, glossing 1 Corinthian 7 and the Pauline prohibition of divorce, Milton
takes up the issue of mixed marriages, when only one partner is Christian.
In such cases, Milton contends that the Bible commands divorce to prevent
“an irreligious seducement, fear’d both in respect of the beleever himselfe,
and of his children in danger to bee perverted by the misbelieving parent”
(YP 2.681).
If the children themselves pose a threat to the Christian husband, Milton
argues, citing Luke 14, they must be hated and forsaken (YP 2.682).
He admits that Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians holds a contrary view—“The
unbelieving husband is sanctifi’d by the wife, and the unbelieving wife, is
sanctifi’d by the husband, else were your children uncleane; but now they
are holy”—but notes that even Paul offers an out: “But if the unbelieving
depart, let him depart; a brother or a sister is not under bondage in such
cases: but God hath called us to peace” (YP 2.687-88). God intends
peace, not wrath, in or out of marriage. Finally, Milton cites the early
Christian policies of Theodosius and Valentinian, who held that “a divorce
mutually consented, might bee suffer’d by the law, especially if there were
no children, or if there were, carefull provision was made” (YP 2.700).
In Tetrachordon, as Stephen Fallon remarks, Milton veers away from
his evenhanded concern for both parties and more frequently asserts the interest
of the wronged and faultless husband (Fallon, 230). I would note, in addition,
that Milton casts off metaphor in favor of ever more direct comments about
families. His argument is no longer legal but Biblical, and rests on a reinterpretation
of the foundational texts of Judaeo-Christian marital law. He repeatedly
insists that wrath is the hallmark of an unhappy marriage, but his own rhetoric
is temperate and dispassionate, sympathetic to the plight of husbands and
wives.
Milton’s own wrath explodes in Colasterion, a tract directed not
at women but at the anonymous author who dared attack The Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce by appealing to “Ladies and Gentlewomen, and all
other Maried Women” in An Answer to a book entituled the Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce. Replying to the male author, Milton lets loose in self-righteous
rage, defending himself against the charge that he wrote against wives and
for husbands. However, in this tract he is more critical of women than in
his earlier work on divorce. I want to suggest that he displaces onto his
anonymous antagonist the wrath he felt toward the failure of his own marriage
and toward Mary Powell. It is only in Colasterion that Milton insists on the
responsibility of a woman to be “a wife in som reasonable measure, willing,
and sufficient to perform the chief duties of her Covnant” (YP 2.734).
He further insists on the reasonableness of his expectations, mocking the
accusation that he would have men abandon pregnant women and leave them portionless
(YP 2.734). For the first time, he indulges in vituperation, but his
cascade of hostile adjectives and name-calling is always directed toward his
antagonist, a man stupid, ignorant, willful, and—in a loaded term—“childish”
(YP 2.730).
A bad argument is like a bad marriage, marked by rage, perturbation, bewilderment,
and stubbornness. Colasterion is such a bad argument: Milton indulges
in ad hominem attacks, answers ridicule with ridicule, condescends
to his opponent, and mocks his argumentation as “silly conjectures” (YP
2.751) and his language as barbarous, “jabberment,” and “the noysom stench
of his rude slot” (YP 2.751). Throughout The Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce, Milton argued that good doctrine subordinates the body to
the mind; he rejected Church regulation of marriage because it was grounded
in the needs and regulations of bodily desire, rather than in spiritual mutuality.
In Colasterion, a grotesque rhetoric of the body erupts in metaphors
of vituperation. A bad argument, like a bad marriage, gives grotesque prominence
to the body.
Earlier in the divorce tracts, Milton argued that men needed men for intellectual
companionship, but women for another kind of companionship, an intimacy free
from constant competition and challenge. When Milton rejects the author of
Colasterion as a “mongrel” combination of Servingman and Solicitor,
he enacts a kind of rhetorical divorce. At the end of the tract, he wants
to find a better antagonist, just as in arguing for divorce he wanted to be
free to find a better wife. A better antagonist, like a better wife, will
find Milton a better man:
[I]f any man equal to the matter shall think it appertains him to take
in hand this controversy…let him not, I entreate him, guess by the handling,
which meritoriously hath bin bestowd on this object of contempt and laughter,
that I account it any displeasure don mee to bee contradicted in Print:
but as it leads to the attainment of any thing more true, shall esteem
it a benefit; and shall know how to return his civility and faire Argument
in such a sort, as hee shall confess that to doe so is my choise, and
to have don thus was my chance (YP 2.758).
The mutual “civility” Milton preferred in argument he also sought in marriage.
The rhetorical strategies of vignette, metaphor and vituperation in his divorce
tracts express the hope and desire that motivate a marriage, and the shock,
sorrow, and rage that mark its failure. Without these augmentations, Milton
would have left us with no sense of why his rational argument for marital
reform really matters to him, and to all parents and children.
This essay forms part of the introduction to Milton's Divorce Tracts: Texts
and Contexts, ed. Sara van den Berg and W. Scott Howard (forthcoming, Duquesne
University Press).
Bibliography
Fallon, Stephen M. “The Spur of Self-Concernment: Milton in His Divorce
Tracts.” Milton Studies 38 (2000), 220-42.
Patterson, Annabel. “‘No Meere Amatorious Novel.’” Politics, Poetics,
and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James G.
Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 88-95.
Sirluck, Ernest, ed. Complete Prose Works of John Milton,
vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
Responses to this piece intended for the Readers'
Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.
