SOURCE: “From Woman Warrior to Warrior Reasoner: Lady Alice and Intellectual Freedom in A Mask,” in Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind, edited by Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham, Susquehanna University Press, 1997, pp. 93-106.

[In the essay below, Parisi examines the character Lady Alice from Milton's Comus and discusses the portrayal of women's ability to reason.]

The evaluation of Milton's women as reasoners stirs much of the debate for or against an implied feminism in the major poetry.¹ The sure-spoken Lady of A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle provides an example. Combatting Comus, she quickly moves past the awkwardness of a woman breaking silence in this period. Reason justifies her:

                                        I had not thought to have unlockt my lips
In this unhallow'd air, but that this Juggler
Would think to charm my judgment, as mine eyes,
Obtruding false rules prankt in reason's garb.
I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

(756-61)²

At her words, Comus, not Alice, becomes the “cold” and “shudd'ring” one, “feel[ing] … fear” (802, 800).³ For her, reason points to virtue and virtue to a psychological integritas. As an able female reasoner, she is self-affirmed: “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind” (663).

Certainly if there is any mark of Miltonic fortitude, it is that of standing strong in reason. So even when Milton's women err, their ability to reason points to their “freedom and sufficiency,”⁴ and so exemplifies what later becomes a major proof of women's equality with men. Unfortunately, however, to consider Alice virtuous in light of reason occasions a comparison with Milton's other females tempted, Eve and Dalila, who do not benefit. As a model of reason, Alice shows up her counterparts by setting an example they fall short of. She resists temptation; they cannot. Reason as a sign of virtue that marks Adam's and Samson's best moments is the measure against which Milton's women are decried in their worst. Dalila's point about women in argument with men is proven by the basis that exists in Milton for dividing his women into two camps: when they are judged according to criteria for behavior or worth that also serve to circumscribe them, women “ever / [Go] by the worse” (Samson Agonistes, 903-4).

Alice's relationship to reason anticipates later feminists' efforts to abstract reason from among the differences between the genders in order to support women's claim for education. It would be difficult to read Mary Astell's references to women, schooled in their religion, as “eminently and unmovably good … too firm and stable to be mov'd by the pitiful Allurements of sin” without thinking of Alice, especially Comus's captive Alice, in whom “Reason and Truth … firm and immutable”⁵ form her to be literally frozen. So it is tempting to ascribe feminist feeling to Milton for allowing Alice, a female, to in some sense pioneer his call for Christian liberty.

The problem comes with eliding the difference between Lady Alice as a mouthpiece for Milton's libertarian concerns and as an embodiment of feminist consciousness.⁶ The reasoning women for whom Alice is a prototype, and to whom well-intentioned readers join her, formulate their identities in response to discourses that set women apart from reason, forcing them to dissociate from the especially female (e.g., emotional, trivial, and pleasure loving) of their sex and so from aspects of themselves. Thus, as a proof of moral fortitude, the ability of these women to keep integrity largely as a function of reason includes self-rejection. Insofar as their “mind[s] and … bod[ies] are invaded by a social definition of … femininity that threatens to disconnect [them] from their own experience,”⁷ or makes it impossible to articulate that experience coherently, they are self-alienated. Now Alice, Eve, and Dalila meet in the same camp—with real women of the period whose lives and writings suggest the difficulties of a woman's coming to speak at all.

To rephrase at least part of my thesis, readings that would appropriate Alice for feminism argue from basically the same standpoint as Renaissance (and then later) philosophers who assert the sexlessness of virtue or, relatedly, the nongendered nature of the intellect. In the “new sciences” of the seventeenth century, “law” came to inhabit the universe at the same time that the principle of self-rule, reason, now defined the individual. As a way to ensure that the “truth” of divinely ordered hierarchies might be seen, a connection obtained between who was reasonable and who was virtuous. “The law itself was fulfilled by the expectation that if human beings were good, they would be reasonable; and conversely, that if they were not reasonable, they would be neither good nor fully human.”⁸ Theoretically, the principle pertained equally to men and women. Reason was a potential democratizer, centralizing an essentially genderless aspect of selfhood.

It is easy to understand how women of the seventeenth century would want to appropriate a genderless intellect, if possible, in order to share a greater part in letters, literacy, and the public life. Margaret Cavendish wrote that without the popular acknowledgment of women's intellect, “we are become like Worms that only Live in the Dull Earth of Ignorance, Winding our Selves sometimes out by the Help of some Refreshing Rain of good Education, which seldome is given us, for we are Kept like Birds in Cages to Hop up and down in our Houses.”⁹ Following Descartes, who “wanted even women to understand something”¹⁰ of his philosophy, women like Cavendish, most often already joined to humanist households, took up the notion of a genderless intellect for the new freedom it offered.¹¹ Disdaining the “dull insipid Trifles” and “debasing Impertinences”¹² of the rituals and pastimes foisted upon them as leisured women, they sought a part in the period's burgeoning scientific and philosophic activity. They advised each other to “learn Descartes's philosophy … not only because it disabuses us of a million commonly held errors but also because it teaches us how to think properly.” The writer adds, “Without it we would die of boredom in this province.”¹³

For others, women's exhortations to reason registered urgency and even anger. As Bathsua Makin wrote “To all Ingenious and Vertuous Ladies”:

The Barbarous custom to breed Women low, is grown general amongst us, and hath prevailed so far, that it is verily believed (especially amongst a sort of debauched Sots) that Women are not endued with such Reason, as Men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they are. … To offer to the World the liberal Education of Women is to deface the Image of God in Man, it will make Women so high, and men so low, like Fire in the House-top, it will set the whole world in a Flame.¹⁴

By 1703, the martial “Zeal” of Sarah Fyge Egerton would carry the feminist insistence against “Tyrant Custom” even further. She wrote,

We yeild like vanquish'd Kings whom Fetters bind,
When chance of War is to Usurpers kind;
.....We will our Rights in Learning's World maintain,
Wits Empire, now shall know a Female Reign.(15)

And to some extent, it did. Cavendish, Chudleigh, Lady Anne Finch Conway, and Elizabeth Thomas, among others, initiated relationships with some of the most noted philosophers and scientists of the day, often spurring their mentors to develop or amend allegedly original claims and theories.¹⁶

Alice's withstanding of Comus spins on a self-possessiveness that is rooted in her capacity to reason, in the manner of Sarah Fyge Egerton and others. Alice's circumstances and rhetoric, as well as the lives and writings of these women, model similar dilemmas of social inscription. All have dubious relationships to the authority they claim. As I mean to show, Alice's remarkable confidence in debating Comus must be read in the context of the culture's safeguards against women's actually attaining the full freedom of mind and conscience it held out to them. While the humanists had already established the universality of the mind in their advocacy for women's education, and while the idea of comparable intellects between the sexes was—and has been—revolutionary in its implications, changes in family structure were solidifying patriarchal authority.¹⁷ Women's agency was undermined also despite Paul's notion of spiritual equality. At the same time that they were acknowledging women's autonomy insofar as they were to be held accountable for their own actions, Renaissance philosophers disputed women's freedom of conscience when it conflicted with their “natural” obligations as childbearer and nurse.¹⁸

As Catherine Belsey notes, it is this frequent jolting of identity across a range of discourses that “exert[s] a pressure on concrete individuals to seek new, non-contradictory subject-positions.” Women, defined and redefined by others' terms, are especially open to such determinative action. Toward this end, the “liberal humanist discourse of freedom, self-determination and rationality”¹⁹ attracted many women of the mid to late seventeenth century. But these women claimed rationality from different starting points than men did. As intellects, men abstracted themselves from a network of social obligations. Reason supported men's reach for greater self-sufficiency in the social realm and also ameliorated the threat that individuals would suddenly feel isolated.²⁰ Similarly in their own way reaching for social self-sufficiency, so-called “Cartesian” women sought retreat from the family. Erica Harth notes: “seventeenth-century literature by and about women was generally consistent with [the idea of the separability of mind and body] and included variations on the theme, ‘the mind has no sex.’ With the diffusion of Cartesianism, this phrase became something of a feminist rallying cry.”²¹ Not only did it validate women's capacity for intellectual pursuits by virtue of their owning, like men, their own “seamlessly unified” and “gloriously autonomous” selves,²² but it also made possible a degree of escape from “the obligations and prejudices attached to their female bodies.”²³

Still, women were tapping into a discourse that was principally for shaping new positions of authority for men. Women pitched their voices in a sense, projecting themselves beyond spheres of constricted female activity. But “it was precisely Descartes's dualism … seem[ing] to support [women] as thinking subjects” that “seemed to drain the thinking subject of all feeling and emotion connected to the body and to reduce the body to a mere machine.”²⁴ Women's discourses of reason surface at the same time that bourgeois values of family are being strengthened. The wave of female prophecy during the Interregnum, when women's bodies could physically and symbolically disrupt social conventions, saw women, by 1700, rejected as spiritual authorities. As Phyllis Mack shows, there is a relationship between certain women's loss of power positions within radical politics and a rhetoric of introspection. It appears that with the evacuation of women's bodies from public mediation comes the cultivation of individual voice.²⁵

Readings that would appropriate Alice (especially the captive Alice) for feminism take up an Enlightenment ideal of selfhood that in its essence privileges voice. Humanism draws on the power of voice—i.e., the power of self-naming. But as my argument already suggests: “The subject is not only a grammatical subject, ‘a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions,’ but also a subjected being who submits to the authority of the social formation.”²⁶ Alice's “real” subjectivity, as it pertains to that authority as it variously claims subjectivity for her, must be negotiated by a social framework (represented by the Attendant Spirit and his band) by the end of the mask that helps reincorporate her into various relationships that will define her identity from that point on. Thus, given the relationship with the social framework, how far can we go in claiming Alice for individualism or its liberal brand of feminism?

To see reason as a mode of expression for women that reflected changes in family structure and perceptions of women moves us closer to reading the inert Alice, with voice resounding, of the palace scene. Alice's reasoned self-defense certainly shares the temper and assumptions of her Cartesian contemporaries. First, the implicit right to speak claimed by Alice denotes Descartes's support for a nongendered intellect. As a fellow human being, she has all the mental wherewithal to discern and name truth—“a mind entirely free of all prejudice,”²⁷ in Descartes's words—and in hers, an “[un]charm[ed] judgment” (758) so as to see “false rules prankt in reason's garb” (759). She also has stable measures by which to check her assumptions. She knows that Comus's “cordial Julep” (672) is “treasonous” (702), for instance, for

                                                                                                                                                                none
But such as are good men can give good things,
And that which is not good, is not delicious
To a well-govern'd and wise appetite.

(702-5)

(Is she telling us that she wouldn't like the cordial anyway?) The equivalent of scientific principles drawn from experience minimizes the threat of variable results that a test of her virtue could yield. These and other lines of Alice's speech can point toward readings that figure or refute questions of unacknowledged desire—as in Leah Marcus's reference to Margery Evans, a fourteen-year-old servant girl whose reputed volition in her own rape in 1631 may stand behind the mask; or William Kerrigan's suggestion that Alice is fighting with Comus against her own sexual impulses.²⁸ In a philosophical world in which the movements of both heart and mind act according to a capricious will, Alice's body, now made inert, signals women's general transition to a new and more gendered moral plane. Coming to speak, Alice enters discourse at a place predeterminative of desire and/or its fracturing. She exhibits a new kind of verbal effluence that, as it is spoken, subjects itself to the analysis of the speaker. As reasoner, Alice is in full ownership of her words while making audible—for herself and her audience—an internal process of self-scrutiny.

Second, Alice's tone and rhetoric in the palace scene have something in common with an emerging tradition of women's reactive polemic. As the earliest form of women's debate, it gained wide currency in the mid and late seventeenth century with “Cartesian women” like Chudleigh and Fyge Egerton, along with pseudonymous writers like Jane Anger, Ester Sowernam, and Joan Sharpe. Its first occasions were the “injustice” of an unsolicited misogynist attack, to which women felt compelled to respond, despite the injunctions against their speaking or writing. Once they broke silence, they went at their detractors with abandon, “respond[ing] fierce[ly] in tone and intensity … return[ing] blow for blow.”²⁹ It was the new mode of scientific inquiry that enabled women, along with men, to claim both reason and experience as a way to tear at arguments upheld by custom, authority, and shared assumptions among men.³⁰

Perhaps Alice does not read into Comus's invitation to make “Beauty … current” (740) as “nature's coin” (739) an explicitly misogynous attack, but his suggestion does provoke her to fill the “unhallow'd air” (757) of the palace with words defending the honor of a force that Comus and she personify as female. The Lady corrects Comus's view of nature as indulgent mother: “she, good cateress” (764), “most innocent nature” (762).

Means her provision only to the good
That live according to her sober laws
And holy dictate of spare Temperance.

(765-67)

Like the female reactives emerging in society, Alice attacks not only her detractor, nor even principally her detractor, but “a specified opinion or doctrine.”³¹ She rejects Comus's argument that spending all the currency of nature shows gratitude for nature's gifts and pays her homage:

If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a modest and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature's full blessings would be well dispens't
In unsuperfluous even proportion,
And she no whit encumber'd with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank't,
His praise due paid.

(768-76)

Moreover, she castigates “not only the offending male but the behavior of men in general,”³² that is, all who uphold Comus's assumptions.

Most striking, however, is the tone of her arguments. Had she not disdained the attempt to have Comus “convinc't” (792),

                                                                                the uncontrolled worth
Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits
To such a flame of sacred vehemence,
That dumb things would be mov'd to sympathize,
And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake,
Till all thy magic structures rear'd so high,
Were shatter'd into heaps o'er thy false head.

(793-99)

As with some late seventeenth-century women writers, her words warn of an apocalyptic overturning of the established order. For Alice, the source of resistance is reason's sheer forcefulness. Containing her, it is a power that is itself contained. Let loose it could enflame the world and tumble it. In fact, she has followed reason so far here that she is on the cusp of losing reason, losing her grasp on self. Like early Quaker prophetesses whose forceful identification with the voice of divine authority prompted their experience of self-transcendence, Alice nears a transformation into pure superego. However, it is a temporary modulation, and one that Alice cannot sustain, just as the Quakers' move away from radical politics would soon mollify such passion in prophecy, a development occuring at the same time that post-Revolution politics would redefine women's role in the family.³³ Ironically coinciding with a toning down of women's voices and roles within an important realm of reactive politics for women, these are the last words in the mask that Alice speaks.

Subtending the historical specificity of Alice's problem as speaker is the shift in women's agency from the time of myth and hagiography. Among Alice's literary prototypes are the desert wanderers of the saints' lives that share their motifs with classical mythology and medieval romance. Whether as the Amazon of the woods, the woman warrior in disguise, or the androgyne, the virtuous woman of literature traditionally keeps close ties to the male world of militancy and independence. As tradition progresses, woman's independence moves closer to militancy against the self. Diana and her band used their virgin powers to ward off external enemies. The story of Acteon's cruel fate after intruding upon Diana demonstrated the dangers of violating the sacred space of female power.³⁴ By the time of Milton's mask, the realm of inviolability is becoming the female body. Now the nymph acts as huntress of her own impure impulses.

In Marcus's reading of A Mask with Margery Evan's story of rape in the background, a woman's sincerity decides her complicity or innocence when others sexually affront her. (Alice's sincerity, her inviolateness of mind, marks virginity from chastity, the latter being a determinative aspect of character.³⁵ The Elder Brother praises Alice as a daughter of Diana, but he also leaves room for condemning her, or women like her, should they “clot” their souls “by contagion” (467) of

                                                                                                                                                                lust
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin.

(463-65)

Diana's strength derived from a mystery of power that females shared. In the world of A Mask, the shared space of power closes around each female until ideally she becomes “clad in complete steel” (421), inviolate not only to intruders or to the “savage fierce, Bandit or mountaineer” (426) but also to her own potential for self-defilement.

Renaissance philosophers wrote that women's self-vigilance was warranted. Pierre Le Moyne, for instance, inverted models of the femme forte tradition to turn the woman against herself. He wrote that “women have not everyday Holoferneses's to vanquish [as Judith did], but everyday [their own] excess vanity, delights, and all pleasing and troublesome passions.”³⁶

To further their interests in education, women would soon parrot similar sentiments: “A rational mind will be employ'd, it will never be satisfy'd in doing nothing, and if you neglect to furnish it with good materials, 'tis like to take up with such as come to hand.”³⁷ For Mary Astell, plays and romances presented this danger. For other women, female “Exorbitancies … those Toyes and Trifles, they now spend their time about” were familiar enough to need little specifying. Affirming women's intellect also meant offering a picture of women's penchant for pleasure. “Bad women,” wrote Bathsua Makin, are uneducated women, “weak to make Resistance,” and thus “strong to tempt to evil: Therefore without all Doubt great Care ought to be taken, timely to season them with Piety and Virtue.”³⁸ Culture's drive to observe, classify, and otherwise dominate an unwieldy nature is epitomized in women's own efforts to claim education as a potential means for achieving power over self.

It is the course of this modulation, from woman warrior to warrior reasoner, that A Mask charts. Despite the tradition of strong women that surrounds Alice,³⁹ she progresses away from rather than toward it. She is that tradition's vagrant. From her first efforts to stave off “a thousand fantasies” (205) from crowding her psyche, reason has been the Lady's “Land-Pilot” (309). Along with “Conscience” (212), she enlists as guardians “pure-ey'd Faith” (212) and “white-handed Hope” (213)—reason's retinue for Christian liberty—in order to control perception's sometimes unorganizable nature and the threat it poses to a humanist conception of self.

In good part, it is the Lady's rationality that locks her into Comus's power in the first place. Throughout the mask, Alice places great stock in words and the ear's ability to “[attend]” (272) them. She overtrusts in the period's new emphasis on the worthy man's integrity in matters of speech, demanding no further assurance of Comus's promise to lead her from the woods. “Shepherd,” she says, “I take thee at thy word” (321). She also tries to reason impending harm away:

                                                                                                                        In a place
Less warranted than this or less secure
I cannot be, that I should fear to change it.

(326-28)

She weighs two potential dangers—one of staying, the other of going. Choosing to go, she enters into a kind of liberal contract, a sign of freedom, and reaffirms her powers of rational autonomy.

Following her inclination to chart her course by reason, the Lady practices a rational piety, one driven by the period's interest in “the word”—doctrines, sermons, credos, catechisms and their recitations—which often sought out women as their first pupils. Many times during A Mask, it is possible to hear Alice's spontaneous protestations as a rehearsal of the rote learning that was a part of women's religious education. Her statement “These thoughts may startle well, but not astound / The virtuous mind” (210-11) bears this quality, especially in that the idea surfaces in response to sensations that potentially could lead her away from reason's path. The observation especially seems to hold in her debate with Comus. She meets the offer of Comus's drink, another potential destabilizer, with a precept to which I referred earlier (“none / But such as are good men can give good things” [702-3]). And her most potent rebuttal, on keeping to the “sober laws / And holy dictate of spare Temperance” (766-67), mounts one principle on top of another: “If every just man that now pines with want. …”; “swinish gluttony / Ne'er looks to Heav'n” (768, 776-77). The question is not whether she is capable of debating Comus; at issue is to what extent she has been prepared to debate and in the interest of which ideology as it concerns women?

Part of her rational piety is a penchant for anticipating the future rather than grasping the present. As with many religious women, hope and faith come to substitute intellectually for pleasure, which is removed to the next world or to an ideal one. In her conjuring a “glist'ring Guardian” (219) at the onset of danger, we see where Alice first depends upon imagination, although she evokes such a guardian through the exertions of reason and also of virtue as reason's nearly tangible corollary. For her dreams and fears

                                                  may startle well, but not astound
The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended
By a strong siding champion Conscience.

(210-12)

In the threat of danger, she peoples her consciousness with agents who will keep her mind, and thus her body, on track. “Faith … Hope” (213) and “Chastity” (215) she “see[s] … visibly” (216) and “now believe[s] / That he, the Supreme good” (216-17) would take ultimate measures—as the “glist'ring Guardian”—to keep Alice's “life and honor” (220).⁴⁰

In the palace scene, the force of her argument trips up its own progress headlong into the future. “Shall I go on?” she asks, “Or have I said enough?” (779-80). Her incentive to quit arguing is that her words might precipitate a cataclysm within Comus's castle. Perhaps this would be the first step toward ushering in a more just society. But she is future abstracted, there instead of here. At the very end of her defense she edges toward a moment of ecstatic prophecy that would leave reason behind. As Beverly Harrison and Carter Heyward write of Christian religious dualism in general: “This disembodied sensibility, in which pleasure is fundamentally a state of mind, is steeped in the eschatological promise that the realm of the divine … is, for Christians, here but not quite here; now but not quite yet.”⁴¹ Alice's hopefulness, manifest in her “rapt spirits” (794), betrays the extent to which she has removed herself from the present. For the mind is the only realm that she can safely occupy being virtuous.

Alice's mode of faith stands in contrast to Comus's paganism, whose roots are a sense of place and present time (which the mask's benevolent genii also share). The fervor with which Comus dances toward ecstasy compares to the near-convulsiveness that the Lady reaches through her own speech. For Comus, “Nature [did] pour her bounties forth / With such a full and unwithdrawing hand” that now “no corner” is “vacant of her plenty” (710-11, 717, 718). As his rounds and revels demonstrate, religion relinks the individual to the group. It celebrates the communicant's sense of immediacy. Alice's piety, by contrast, more closely typifies religion's general shift with Protestantism to conceptual realms of social ethics and belief. Given the conflation of rhetorics in Alice's speech (her passionate prophetic utterance that has reason as its underpinning), Alice emerges as a cultural contradiction of sorts. Reason restrains her liberty to take ecstatic flight through prophecy at the same time that her movement toward prophecy destabilizes rational speech.

On various levels, then, Alice relates to women of the seventeenth century who define themselves chiefly in terms of reason, while she also speaks to the circumstances under which they engaged such intellectual discourse. To return specifically to the palace scene, Alice's words offer a glimpse of a subjectivity so fiercely coherent, so staunch in its sense of self, that Comus, the master of metamorphosis, shakes in his boots. But the scene, the culmination of the Lady's course of travel, through culture, also represents Alice's enunciative movement from woman warrior to warrior reasoner. What we see provides Alice's words with their own situational context. Immobilized in her chair, Alice embodies physical stasis, virtue forever frozen in time. What has her enchantment by Comus effected? It has brought about the arrest of her body from movement, desire, and change. Like the saints of icons and statues, she is preserved from the flux of time. Simultaneously, patriarchal society, having fixed her as image, rests safe from the danger of her sexuality.

It is something close to this kind of cessation, on the level of the family and state, that Renaissance treatises sought by advocating that women eradicate “all pleasing and troublesome passions.” Here is the danger of Comus's cup: to drink from it would reengender the problem of desire if we reconceptualize that desire as “the jugular of social relatedness and psychological integration.”⁴² When readers see Alice's “no” to Comus in terms of liberty exercised by reason, they speed past the ways in which culture forces women perpetually to respond to the same types of question. (Will she? Did she? How much does she want to or not want to?) The magician's offer to “restore all soon” (689) threatens an even deeper choice Alice regrettably already has had to make. For her as a would-be “Cartesian,” the choice has been either of retaining agency on the intellectual level or resubmitting to popular conceptions of woman in terms of “lyghte and triflynge” diversions, “fantasies,” and “wanton and pyvyshe” pleasures.⁴³ Remember, we do not see the moment when Comus binds Alice; Comus had had assistance from many factors, including the enforced complicity of his subject herself.

Notes

1. Eve's reasoning in the separation scene is central to arguments that criticize her, and it is “excusable” in those that support her. Similarly, Dalila receives only slight commendation for daring to debate Samson, the “wavering” quality of her argument receiving the attention. See, for example, Dennis Burden, The Logical Epic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 83-91; H. V. S. Ogden, “The Crisis of Paradise Lost Reconsidered,” Philological Quarterly 36 (1957): 1-19; Joan Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), chapter four; and Thomas Kranidas, “Dalila's Role in Samson Agonistes,” SEL 6 (1966): 125-37. For more positive views, see Diane McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John C. Ulreich, “‘Incident to All Our Sex’: The Tragedy of Dalila,” in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 185-209; and Stella Revard, “Dalila as Euripidean Heroine,” Papers on Language and Literature 23 (1987): 291-302.

2. John Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). All references to Milton's poetry are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Since Lady Alice Egerton played the role of the Lady in A Mask, I use her name interchangeably with that of the character.

4. McColley, Milton's Eve, 158.

5. Mary Astell, “A Serious Proposal to the Ladies” (London, 1701), in First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799, ed. Moira Ferguson (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), 184.

6. Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), shows the degree to which Milton's treatment of women and liberty supported the creation of a feminist consciousness in the eighteenth century. While Wittreich alludes to the presentation of Alice in A Mask as yet another example of a Milton who was sympathetic to women's causes, he also acknowledges that in Paradise Lost there are “discrepancies between … two consciousnesses” (68)—between that of a feminist and Milton's own, of which an eighteenth-century female readership was keeping aware. Elaine Pagels's point that “contradictory attitudes toward women reflect a time of social transition” (quoted by Wittreich, 68) is well-taken, with Milton perhaps himself divided.

   I enter the debate on Milton's feminism not trying to negotiate hermeneutically among protofeminist and masculinist references in Milton. Rather, I want to deal with what a protofeminist reading of Milton might start with—a woman's speaking virtuously as itself a compromised and compromising act in the light of a specific cultural climate.

7. Muriel Dimen, “Power, Sexuality, and Intimacy,” in Gender / Body / Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 37.

8. Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 65.

9. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Two Most Famous Universities of England,” preface to Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1655), quoted in First Feminists, ed. Moira Ferguson, 85.

10. René Descartes, Letter to Father Vatier, in Oeuvres, ed. Adam and Tannery (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897), 1:560, quoted in Erica Harth, “Cartesian Women,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 147.

11. Harth, “Cartesian Women,” 148-50.

12. Mary Chudleigh, “To the Reader,” in Essays Upon Several Subjects in Prose and Verse (London: T. H. for R. Bonwicke, W. Freeman, T. Goodwin, 1710), quoted in Hilda Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 64-65.

13. Jean Corbinelli, Letter of 23 August 1673 to Mme. de Sévigné, in Correspondance, vol. 1, ed. Duchene (Paris: Gallimard, 1972-78), quoted in Harth, “Cartesian Women,” 151.

14. Bathsua Makin, “An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentle-women” (London, 1673), quoted in First Feminists, ed. Moira Ferguson, 129.

15. “The Emulation,” 11.1, 15-16, 32-33, quoted in First Feminists, ed. Moira Ferguson, 169-70. Carol Barash writes that Egerton's aggressive tone suggests a “feminist imperialism” that arises in the writing of women during Queen Anne's reign. See “‘The Native Liberty … of the Subject’: Configurations of Gender and Authority in the Works of Mary Chudleigh, Sarah Fyge Egerton, and Mary Astell,” in Women, Writing, History 1640-1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 55-69.

16. Ruth Perry, “Radical Doubt and the Liberation of Women,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1985): 477-89.

17. Smith, Reason's Disciples, 60, 53-54.

18. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 21-23.

19. Catherine Belsey, “Constructing the Subject: Deconstructing the Text,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 597-98.

20. My ideas about abstract individualism were suggested in part by Jackie DiSalvo, who developed the concept in “Gender and Liberal Political Theory in Paradise Lost,” read at the Third International Milton Symposium, Florence, Italy, June 1988, and forthcoming in The Idolatry of Woman, the Ideology of Progress and the Masculinization of Culture in the Works of John Milton. I am indebted to Professor DiSalvo for sharing her thoughts with me as I developed this reading of Alice.

21. Harth, “Cartesian Women,” 149.

22. Toril Mori, Sexual / Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 8.

23. Harth, “Cartesian Women,” 150.

24. Ibid.

25. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatis Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially chapter four. Mack sees the physically transgressive behavior of female Quaker visionaries—the “loosening of all bodily inhibition in tears, groans, and shaking” (150)—as weakening distinctions between individuals existing in different social categories. She argues that introspection and self-analysis are more prominent in Quaker texts by women as allowances for women's physical expressiveness diminish. This shift toward greater restraint of the body in women's religious expression coincides with a growing emphasis on proper female decorum in general. See, for example, Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), especially part 1.

    I am not suggesting that Alice can be identified with Quaker prophetesses of the mid 1600s. But they are another group of women, like the Cartesian women and early female reactives, with whom I do align Alice, who typifies a problem of women's enunciative positions.

26. Belsey, “Constructing the Subject,” 596.

27. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. L. Lafleur, quoted in Perry, “Radical Doubt,” 478.

28. Leah Marcus, “The Earl of Bridgewater's Legal Life: Notes toward a Political Reading of Comus,” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 13-23. William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, chapter 2).

29. Moira Ferguson, introduction to First Feminists, 28.

30. See the collection of pamphlets by women (using real and pseudonymous names), The Women's Sharpe Revenge: Five Women's Pamphlets from the Renaissance, ed. Simon Shepherd (New York: St. Martin's, 1985). On Mary Astell, see Catherine Sharrock, “De-ciphering Women and De-scribing Authority: The Writings of Mary Astell,” in Women, Writing, History, ed. Grundy and Wiseman, 109-24.

31. Moira Ferguson, First Feminists, 27, 28.

32. Ibid., 28.

33. Mack, Visionary Women, 406-12.

34. See Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology: The Age of Fable (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1987), 40-42.

35. Marcus, “The Earl of Bridgewater's Legal Life,” 13-23.

36. Pierre Le Moyne, The Gallery of Heroik Women, trans. Marquesse of Winchester (London: Henry Seile, 1652), 35, quoted in Mary Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 166.

37. Astell, “A Serious Proposal,” 189.

38. Makin, “An Essay to Revive,” 130-31.

39. The affinities that Alice shares with Diana are well noted in Milton criticism. See as examples Kathleen Wall, “A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle: The Armor of Logos,” in Milton, ed. Walker, 52-65; Richard Halpern, “Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 88-105.

40. The world of imagination, especially as it concerns the power of poetry, will play a major role in the Lady's rescue. See Cedric C. Brown, “Presidential Travels and Instructive Augury in Milton's Ludlow Masque,” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 9-10.

41. Beverly Harrison and Carter Heyward, “Pain and Pleasure: Avoiding the Confusions of Christian Tradition in Feminist Theory,” in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Carole Bohn and Joanne Carlson Brown (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), 154.

42. Dimen, “Power, Sexuality,” 38.

43. Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1521, 1529), 9, quoted in Betty Travitsky, ed., The Paradise of Women: Writings by Englishwomen of the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 17.