SOURCE: "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. LXXXXIII, No. 3, May, 1978, pp. 368-81.

To resusrrect "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister," Virginia Woolf declares in A Room of One's Own, literate women must "look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view." The perfunctory reference to Milton is curiously enigmatic, for the allusion has had no significant prior development, 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 suggestive. Shutting out the view, Milton's bogey cuts women off from the spaciousness of possibility, the predominantly male landscapes of fulfillment Woolf has 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 mystery 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 specter or—to use Harold Bloom's critical terminology—"Covering Cherub" who blocks the view for women poets. It may refer to Adam, who is Milton's (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…."

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. For what if such a fiercely masculine cosmic Author is the sole legitimate model for all earthly authors? Milton's myth of origins, summarizing a long misogynistic tradition, clearly implied this question to the many women writers who directly or indirectly recorded anxieties about patriarchal poetry. A minimal list of such figures would include Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, 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. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, by contrast, is a radically corrective "misreading" of Milton, a kind of Blakean Bible of Hell, with 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 Barrett Browning's "A Drama of Exile," Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, and Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" all include or imply revisionary critiques of Paradise Lost, while George Eliot's Middlemarch 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 Hint" and "Burglar! Banker—Father," Emily Dickinson, as Albert Gelpi has perceptively noted, was "passionately Byronic," and therefore, as we shall see, subtly anti-Miltonic. For all these women, in other words, the question of Milton's misogyny was not in any sense an academic one. 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 causal 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 Paradhe Lost while I am about it. Impressions fairly well describes the sort of thing 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, in the sublime aloofness 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.

Interestingly, even the diffident first sentence of this paragraph expresses an uncharacteristic humility, even ner vousness, in the presence 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 judgments 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 insoluble 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 extraordinarily 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 lineeven 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'". And interestingly, Woolf herself echoes just this line in speaking of her father years after his death. Had Sir Leslie Stephen lived into his nineties, she remarks, "His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable." 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 confrontations 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.

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 revisions of history, appear quite deliberately to exclude Milton from their radically transformed chronicles of literary events. Hermaphroditic Orlando meets Shakespeare, 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 revisionary historian of Between the Acts. As Bloom notes, one way in which a poet evades anxiety is to deny even the existence of the precursor poet who causes anxiety.

When, however, Woolf does allude to Milton in her fiction, as she does in her first novel, 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 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." Milton's invocation to "Sabrina Fair," the goddess "under the glassy, cool, translucent wave," seeks the salvation of a maiden who has been turned to stone, but these words from Comus have a very different effect on Rachel. Heralding illness, they draw her toward a "deep pool of sticky water," murky with images derived from Woolf's own episodes of madness, and ultimately they plunge her into the darkness "at the bottom of the sea". Would death to Milton, one wonders, have been life for Rachel?

Charlotte Brontë would certainly have thought so. Because Woolf was such a sophisticated literary critic, she 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 Charlotte Brontë who seemed most aware of Milton's threatening qualities, particularly of the extent to which his influence upon women's fate might be seen as—to borrow a pun from Bloom—an unhealthy influenza. 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 male-dominated society. "Milton was great; but was he good?" asks 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 rosetrees and nasturtiums about the latticed window, preparing a cold collation for the reactors,—preserves, and "dulcet creams"—puzzled "What choice to choose for delicacy best…."

Shirley's allusion is to the passage in Book V 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, 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 Brontë has Shirley turn against it. But the alternative that Brontë 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 reclines her 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 contend 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 wrong voice, Shirley's is strong, assertive, vital. Where Milton's Eve is domestic, Shirley's is daring. Where Milton's Eve is from the first curiously hollow, as if somehow created corrupt, "in outwardshow / Elaborate, of inward less exact," Shirley's is filled with "unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence." Where Milton's Eve is a sort of divine afterthought, an almost superfluous and mostly material being created from Adam's "supernumerary" rib, Shirley's is spiritual, primary, "heavenborn." 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 revision of this myth, called Judith Shakespeare and who was herself condemned to death by Milton's bogey.

Besides having interesting descendants, however, Shirley's titanic woman has interesting ancestors. For instance, if she is herself a sort of Prometheus as well as Prometheus' 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') but "the unconquerable will" Milton's fiend opposes to the "tyranny of Heav'n." In addition, the gigantic size of Milton's fallen angel ("in bulk as huge / As whom the Fables name of monstrous size, / Titanian, or Earthborn') 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 I of Paradise Lost and just as Blake's fallen Albion (another neo-Miltonic figure) appears with his right foot "on Dover cliffs, his heel / On Canterburys ruins; his right hand [covering] lofty Wales / His left Scotland." But of course Milton's Satan is himself the ancestor of all the Promethean heroes conceived by the Romantic poets who influenced Brontë. And as if to acknowledge that fact, she has Shirley remark that under her Titan-woman's breast "I see 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 reflection of 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 IX is "a tissue of Satanic echoes," with its central argument, "Look on me. / Do not believe," an exact duplicate of the antireligious empiricism embedded in Satan's earlier temptation speech to her. 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 pseudolibertarian speech to his fellow angels in which he asks, "Who can in reason then or right assume / Monarchy over such as live by right / His equals, if in power and splendor less, / In freedom equal?" After her fall, Eve considers the possibility of keeping the fruit to herself "so to add what wants / In Female Sex, the more to draw [Adam's] Love, / And render me more equal."

Again, just as Milton's Satan—despite his pretensions to equality with the divine—dwindles from anangel 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 / Befits thee with him leagu'd, thyself as false / And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape, / Like his, and colour Serpentine may show / Thy inward fraud." The enmity God sets between the woman and the serpent is thus the discord necessary to divide those who are not opposed or mutually hostile 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, not only as Edenic chef but also as the womb, the bearer of 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) fall 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, among other reasons because, 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 Curse aslope / Glanc'd on the ground, with labour I must earn / My bread; what harm? Idleness had been worse …"

We must remember, however, that Eve's relationship to Satan, as Milton delineates it, 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 between them but also by her resemblance to Sin, who is, as it were, his female avatar and, indeed, the only other female who graces (or, rather, disgraces) Paradise Lost. Brontë'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 Brontë 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, / But [ending] foul in many a scaly fold / Voluminous and vast, a serpent arm'd / With mortal sting," seems to exaggerate and parody female anatomy just as the monstrous bodies of Spenser's Error and Duessa do. In addition, with her fairness ironically set against foulness, 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 Greco-Roman story of wise Minerva's birth from the head of Jove. In a patriarchal Christian context the pagan goddess Wisdom may, Milton suggests, become the loathsome 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 / Of Nature."

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 presents her, and as a model Milton's monster provides 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" will meld with Eve when in eating the apple she ends up "eating Death."

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." 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 / But thee, whom follow?") foreshadows Eve's most poignant speech to Adam ("but now lead on;/ … with thee to go, / Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, / Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee / Art all things under Heav'n …," 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 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 matters that so keen a critic as Hazlitt thought her nakedness made her luscious as a piece of fruit.

Despite Milton's well-known misogyny, 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 of Satan, Sin, and Eve, diabolically mimicking the holy trinity of God, Christ, and Adam, 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,

claimed to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme of the [White Goddess] and to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation. In terms of the heavenly bodies, Sun and Saturn were now jointly opposed to Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The five heavenly bodies in opposition made a strong partnership, with a woman at the beginning and a woman at the end. Jupiter and the Moon Goddess paired together as the rulers of the material World, the lovers Mars and Venus paired together as the lustful Flesh, and between the pairs stood Mercury who was the Devil, the Cosmocrator or author of the false creation. It was these five who composed the Pythagorean hyle, or grove, of the five material senses; and spiritually minded men, coming to regard them as sources of error, tried to rise superior to them by pure meditation. This policy was carried to extreme lengthsby the God-fearing Essenes, who formed their monkish communities within compounds topped by acacia hedges, from which all women were excluded; lived ascetically, cultivated a morbid disgust for their own natural functions and turned their eyes away from World, Flesh and Devil.

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 misogyny, though more disguised, 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"). 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 deep / In torment." Made up of his three wives and three daughters, this archetypal abandoned woman knows very well that Milton's antifeminism has deadly implications for her own character as well as for her fate. "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. / Hence arose all our terrors in Eternity!"

Still, although he was troubled by Milton's misogyny and was radically opposed to the Cartesian dualism that 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 Lost 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 might well conclude with Blake that Milton wrote of God "in fetters" and was "of the Devils party without knowing it." And so Blake, blazing a path for Shirley and for Shelley, for Byron and for Mary Shelley, and for all the Brontës, presented what was to become his famous interpretation of Satan as the real, burningly visionary god—the Los—of Paradise Lost, with "God" as the rigid and death-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 T. S. Eliot considered "Milton's curly-haired Byronic hero"?

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, Milton's Satan is as alienated from celestial society as any of the early nineteenth-century poets maudit who made him their emblem. Accursed and self-cursing, paradoxical and mystical ("Which way I fly is hell; myself am Hell … Evil be thou my Good," he experiences the guilty double consciousness, the sense of a stupendous self capable of nameless and perhaps criminal enormities, that Byron redefined in Manfred and Cain as marks of superiority. To the extent, moreover, that the tyranny of heaven is associated with Right Reason, Satan is Romantically antirational in his exploration of the secret depths of himself and of the cosmos. He is antirational, too—and Romantic—in his indecorous yielding to excesses of passion, his Byronic "gesture fierce" and "mad demeanor." 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 in one sense oppressed, or at least manipulated, 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 IV emphasizes this: "My Author and Disposer, what thou bidd'st / Unargu'd I obey; so God ordains, / God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more / Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise." But the dream she has shortly after speaking these words to Adam 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 / The Earth outstretcht immense, a prospect wide / And various …," a redefined prospect of happy knowledge not unlike the one Woolf imagines women viewing from their opened windows. And interestingly, brief as is the passage describing Eve's flight, it foreshadowed fantasies that would recur frequently and compellingly in the writings of both women and Romantic poets. Byron's Cain, for instance, disenchanted by what his author called the "politics of paradise," flies through space with his seductive Lucifer like a masculine version of Milton's Eve, and though Shirley's Eve is earthbound—almost earthlike—innumerable other "Eves" of female origin have flown, 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 of flying escapes are derived from Miltonic or Romantic ideas, or from some collective female unconscious, is a difficult question to answer. For the connections among 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 Shirley, for Virginia Woolf as well as for "Judith Shakespeare." Dispossessed by her older brothers (the "Sons of God"), educated to submission, enjoined to silence, the woman writer—in fantasy if not in reality—must often have "stalked apart in joyless revery," like Byron's heroes, like Satan, like Prometheus. Feeling keenly the discrepancy between the angel she was supposed to be and the angry demon she knew she often was, she must have experienced the same paradoxical double consciousness of guilt and greatness that afflicts both Satan and, say, Manfred. Composing herself to saintly stillness, brooding narcissistically like Eve over her own image and like Satan over her own power, she may even have feared occasionally that like Satan—or Lara, or Manfred—she would betray her secret fury 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 visionary prophetic powers with Adam, God, Christ, and the angels, that visionary night world of poetry and imagination, insofar as it is a 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 clearly. It is the main reason for the Satan-God role reversal he postulates. But his friend Mary Wollstonecraft and her Romantic female descendants must have seen it too, just as Byron and Shelley did. For though Adam is magically shown, as in a crystal ball, what the future holds, Satan and Eve are the real dreamers of Paradise Lost, possessed in the Romantic sense by seductive reflections 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 Satan's and Eve's suffering sense of the hellish discrepancy between their aspiration and their position is a model of esthetic nobility to the Romantic poet and the Romantically inspired feminist. Contemplating the "lovely pair" of Adam and Eve in their cozily 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." Her deliberate, ironic confusion of "conscious dignity" and "Satanic pride," together with her Romantic reverence for the sublime, prefigures Shelley's Titan as clearly as Shirley's titanic woman. The imagining of more "sublime" alternative lives, moreover, as Blake and Wollstonecraft also saw, reinforces the revolutionary fervor that Satan the visionary poet, like Satan the aristocratic Byronic rebel, defined for women and Romantics alike.

That the Romantic esthetic has often been linked with visionary politics is, of course, almost a truism. From the apocalyptic revolutions of Blake and Shelley to those of Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, moreover, revisions of the 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 annihilated must be annihilated / That the children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery." Like him, Byron's Lucifer offers autonomy and knowledge—the prerequisites of freedom—to Cain, while Shelley's Prometheus, overthrowing the tyranny of heaven, ushers in "Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory" for all of humanity. Even D. H. Lawrence's Satanic snake, emerging one hundred years later from the hellishly bumingbowels of the earth, seems to be "one of the lords / of life," an exiled king "now due to be crowned again," signaling a reborn society. For in the revolutionary cosmologies of 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.

It is not surprising, then, that women, identifying at their most 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 Vindication of the Rights of Women often reads like an outraged commentary on Paradise Lost, combined a Blakean enthusiasm for the French Revolution—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 of interrelated feelings 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 Brontë, in addition to creating an anti-Miltonic Eve in Shirley, uses the revolutionary anger of the frame-breaking workers with whom the novel is crucially concerned as an image for the fury of its dispossessed heroines. Similarly, as Ellen Moers has perceptively noted, Englishwomen's factory novels (like Gaskell's Mary Barton) and American women's antislavery novels (like Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) submerged or disguised "private, brooding, female resentment" in ostensibly disinterested examinations of larger public issues. More recently, even Virginia Woolf's angrily feminist Three Guineas purports to have begun not primarily as a consideration of the woman question but as an almost Shelleyan dream of transforming the world—abolishing war, tyranny, ignorance, and so on—through the formation of a female "Society of Outsiders."

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. And even if Woolf herself did not see far enough past Milton's bogey to recognize this, a number of other women, both feminists and antifeminists, did. In late nineteenth-century America a well-known journal of Romantically radical politics and feminism was called Lucifer the Light-Bearer, for instance, and in Victorian England Mrs. Rigby wrote of Charlotte Bronte's Byronic and feminist Jane Eyre that "the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home"—in other words, a Byronic, Promethean, Satanic, and Jacobin tone of mind—"is the same which has also written Jane Eyre."

Paradoxically, however, Brontë herself may have been less conscious of the extraordinary complex of visionary and revisionary impulses that went into Jane Eyre than Mrs. Rigby was, at least in part because, like many other women, she found her own anger and its intellectual consequences almost too painful to confront. Commenting 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." 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 skies."

The relationship between women writers and Milton's curly-haired Byronic hero is, however, even more complicated than I have so far suggested. And in the intricate tangle of this relationship resides still another reason for the refusal of writers like Brontë 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, much more obviously, enormously attractive to women. Indeed, as Eliot's phrase suggests—and as Byron's own life indicates—he is in most ways the incarnation of worldly male sexuality: fierce, powerful, experienced, simultaneously brutal and seductive, devil 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 Nietzchean Übermensch, 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 reduplicating 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, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you." Speaking of "Daddy," Plath was of 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 Brontë 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.

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 analogue 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 rebelliousness, his scorn of conventional virtues, his raging energy, the woman writer may have secretly fantasized that she was Satan—or Cain, or Manfred, or Prometheus. But at the same time her feelings 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 on his right hand. Leslie Marchand tells a revealing little story of Mary Shelley's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, that brilliantly illuminates this movement 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 destroy his creature."

Despite Brontë's vision of a Promethean Eve, Shirley betrays a similar sense of the difficulty 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 second parable, the "first woman" passively wanders alone in an alienating landscape, wondering whether she is "thus to burn out and perish, 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 Promethean fire within her, however, as the first Eve's salvation implicitly did, this Eva's redemption comes through 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?" Superficially, this allegorical narrative may be seen as a woman's attempt to imagine a malemuse with whom she can interact in a way that will parallel the male poet's congress with his female muse. But the incestuous Byronic love story in which Brontë embodies her allegorical message is more significant here than the message itself.

It suggests to begin with that, like Claire Clairmont, Brontë 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. Her autonomy is further denied even by the incestuous coupling that 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 of Satan's solipsistic union with Sin is Death, just as death is the fruit of Manfred's love for Astarte and ultimately, I would argue, of all the incestuous neo-Satanic couplings envisioned by women writers from Mary Shelley 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 divinely interdicted wish to be "as Gods," like the desire for the forbidden 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 that Milton inherited from Christian tradition, Satan is in fact a sort of artist of death, the paradigmatic master of all those perverse esthetic techniques that pleasure the body rather than the soul and serve the world rather than God. From the golden palace he erects at Pandemonium 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 sometimes 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" of one 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 the seductive "bevy of fair women" for whom the arts of language, like those of dance and music, are techniques "Bred only … to the taste / Of lustful appetance," sinister parodies of the language of the angels and the music of the spheres. In the shadow 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 / Tastes"—to seem suspect, while the poetry she conceived might well appear to be a monster birth, like Satan's horrible child Death. Fallen like Anne Finch into domesticity, into the "dull mannage of a servile house" 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.

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 artist, God's emissary and defender on earth, Milton himself, as he appears in Paradise Lost, might well have seemed to female 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." 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, 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 insofar as he can beget new ideas upon their chaotic fecundity, like the Holy Spirit "brooding on the vast Abyss" and making it pregnant.

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 "tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight." 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 forceda "northern dialect" to accommodate itself "to greek and latin inversions and intonations." But not only are Greek and Latin the quintessential languages of masculine scholarship (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 fore-knowledge. 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 identified with Milton's bardlike godliness while at the same time identifying with Satan's Promethean energy and fortitude is one of the more understandable paradoxes of literary history. Though they might sometimes have been irreligious and radically visionary with Satan, poets like Wordsworth and Shelley were after all fundamentally "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 as revealing as Milton's. Both Wordsworth and Shelley, for instance, conceive of the poet as a sort of divine ruler, an "unacknowledged legislator" in Shelley's famous phrase and "an upholder and preserver" 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, unalterably opposed to the "idleness and unmanly despair" of the false, effeminate creation. More, he is a virile trumpet that calls mankind to battle, a fiercely phallic sword that consumes its scabbard, and—most Miltonic of all—a godlike "influence which is moved not, but moves," modeled upon Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.

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?" 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 different words: "This is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution." Such an assertion might seem jubilant if made by a man. But the protean shadow of Milton's bogey seems to darken the page as Woolf writes.