SOURCE: Stevens, Paul. “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative.” Milton Studies 34 (1997): 3-21.

[In this essay, Stevens addresses the issue of colonialism in Milton's poem, countering an earlier argument that Paradise Lost maintained an implicit critique of empire.]

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis i, 28

Colonies … have their warrant from God's direction and command; who as soone as men were, set them to their taske, to replenish the earth and subdue it.

The Planter's Plea, 1630¹

While there has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in the relationship between Renaissance literature and the rhetoric of colonialism, and while at the same time there has been a dramatic renewal of interest in Milton's politics, surprisingly little has been written on Milton and colonialism. The most important exception is David Quint's recent book, Epic and Empire (1993). Quint, who approaches the issue through a somewhat ambivalently postmodern analysis of the political implications of genre, comes to the conclusion that the Milton of Paradise Lost is a poet against empire. In this essay I wish to challenge Quint's reading in order to suggest how exactly and to what extent Paradise Lost authorizes colonial activity even while it satirizes the abuses of early modern colonialism.²

I

Until fairly recently, “cultural” in the context of literary studies was understood as something which was by definition apolitical. It was, as Terry Eagleton in an uncharacteristically nostalgic mood has suggested, “the ‘other’ of political society—the realm of being as opposed to doing, the kingdom of ends rather than of means, the home of transcendental spirit rather than the dreary prose of everyday life.”³ For many scholars the exhilaration of professing literature lay precisely in the discipline's promise to transcend the quotidian. All that has clearly changed. After two or three decades of “theory,” for most active critics, the distinction between culture and politics has largely disappeared, and the net result for Renaissance studies as for most other areas of literary study is political criticism.

While the long-term consequences of this change may be significant, its immediate manifestations are rarely as radical or disturbing as the newspapers still like to claim.⁴ What political criticism tends to mean—to use Thomas Kuhn's well-worn but still useful vocabulary—is that political readings of literary texts and the culture in which they were produced have become “normal science,” that is, an institutionally sanctioned, normative practice.⁵ While it is certainly true that many critics are well informed and passionate in their political commitment, at least as many simply acquiesce in the prevailing discourse and often allow the rhetoric of their critical practice to make them sound far more radical than they actually are. Political criticism in Renaissance studies seems to take two predominant forms. On the one hand, it seems to mean integrating literary texts into exciting new homologies of contemporary political issues, thus satisfying the critic's need not only to analyze but to act or effect an “intervention.” On the other hand, it seems to mean simply figuring out the immediate political context of a literary work for no other purpose than a positivist determination to get at the “facts.” In the first form, agency is much more likely to be granted to ideology or discourse; in the second, to local contingencies or the will of the individual. Even in the first form, however, ideology often figures, though certainly not always, as an increasingly limited or mannerist category. In this context, David Quint is especially interesting because, while routinely invoking ideology in Epic and Empire, he appears to be in transit from the first form of critical practice to the second, and in so moving helps to illustrate my point about the domestication of political criticism.

In Epic and Empire, Quint appears as a traditionally trained literary historian, simultaneously eschewing the “bad history” of new historicism's political homologies (pp. 14, 370) while busily adapting the well-tried methods of genre analysis to meet the discipline's apparently insatiable demand for political readings. Quint's first move in this process is to credit familiar literary genres with specific political or ideological implications. Literary history as the history of genres is thus represented as possessing a political life of its own. The two genres he is most interested in are epic and romance. Epic after Virgil, he feels, is the peculiar property of empire, and by empire he means the centralized, expansionist Western state, the Roman Empire and its various early modern heirs. Seen from the perspective of Virgilian epic, romance is the aimless, meaningless fate of the enemies of empire. “To the victors,” so the Aeneid implies, “belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random and circular wandering. Put another way, the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience a contingency that they are powerless to shape to their own ends” (p. 9). But the power of romance is not mocked, and the contingency it articulates, so Quint argues, eventually comes to be seen by the defeated as a means of escaping, contesting, or subverting the power of the victors. To be specific, the contingency of romance enables the defeated to see all kinds of liberating possibilities beyond the totalizing and totalitarian closure of epic narrative.

Thus, in the same way that Patricia Parker in the 1970s—in the heyday of Yale deconstruction—made romance thematize Derridean différance, the distancing, difference, and deferral “intrinsic to language,” so now Quint politicizes it.⁶ Just as in Parker's account, to which Quint is immediately indebted, romance is understood as anticipating Derrida's critique of “Presence”—that is, “the metaphysical assumption of an ultimate Origin, Center, or End, and the various social and intellectual hierarchies it authorises” (p. 220)—so in Quint's account romance stands in opposition to what not surprisingly turns out to be a familiarly Foucauldian version of the imperial state's power. To the degree that Milton's great epic, for instance, turns to romance, so it may be construed, like its sequel Paradise Regained, as “a defense of the individual against the state, against its instruments of surveillance and control” (p. 324). It is difficult at this point not to feel that in Milton Quint is allegorizing his own commonsense belief in individual agency and his desire to distance himself from the Foucauldian moment of early new historicism. In a footnote he refers us to David Bromwich, who valorizes common sense and excoriates theory and “the erosion of [the] secular individualism” it signifies as “perhaps the worst intellectual disaster of the 1970s and 1980s.”⁷

The place of Paradise Lost in Quint's story of politics and generic form is central. The logic of his literary history would seem to demand that Milton's great poem be consigned to the ash heap of beautiful but obsolete imperial epics. The poem is, however, saved by the “turn to romance” which Quint claims is the distinguishing feature of what he calls “the losers' epic” (p. 9), a subgenre inaugurated by Lucan's Pharsalia. In Paradise Lost, the triumphalist epic plot first given a specific ideological direction in Virgil's Aeneid and reproduced in Renaissance poems like Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and Camo˜ens's Lusiads is satirized by Milton in the way Satan's would-be colonial epic collapses into a “bad romance” (p. 248) and transumed in the way Adam and Eve's tragic story turns into a good romance. “Reserving the imperial typology of the Virgilian epic for its God alone,” Quint concludes, “Paradise Lost effectively moves away from epic altogether” (p. 248). Like a more quietist version of the Romantic Milton of Wordsworth's sonnet or Masson's biography, Quint's Milton gradually emerges as a poet against empire, and his poem comes to be seen as “an indictment of European expansion and colonialism that includes his own countrymen and contemporaries” (p. 265). Most important, Milton emerges as an individual who seems so able to manipulate generic form that ideology seems to have little constraining force for him.

Despite Quint's impressive erudition and many brilliant local insights, this reading of Paradise Lost may be questioned on a number of grounds, all of them requiring the reader to step outside the narrow bounds of Quint's politically inflected literary history. Two points, both suggestive of Milton's lack of freedom from ideological constraint, immediately come to mind. First, that Satan's journey to the new world is not so much a satire on colonialism as on the abuses of colonialism. There is, for instance, no evidence to suggest that Milton ever felt the Protestant colonization of New England, Virginia, or Ulster, in principle at least, anything but admirable. Nor does reserving the imperial typology of Virgilian epic to God alone constitute a rejection so much as a displacement of an extraordinarily deep-rooted and tenacious will-to-order which is often hard to distinguish from a will-to-power. Second, that the representation of Adam and Even in Paradise, especially in the way that representation both amplifies and idealizes the colonial imperative embedded in Scripture, confounds the postmodern distinction Quint wishes to make between the political implications of epic and romance. For the new world that Adam and Eve are commanded to replenish and subdue in Genesis—the world Milton calls their “neather Empire” (IV, 145)—is precisely the end that so many early modern colonialists desire and feel themselves duty-bound to seek.⁸ In other words, the image at the heart of the poem of a paradise that is lost, the romance vision of a garden that is to be regained when “the Earth / Shall all be Paradise” (XII, 463-64), is central to the mentalité responsible for the building of European colonial empires. In drawing attention to the imperative of Genesis i, 28, Milton's contemporary, John White, for instance, offers a glimpse of the biblical origin of empire. If we allow, says White in The Planter's Plea, God's command to replenish and subdue the earth “to bind Adam, [then] it must binde his posterity, and consequently our selves in this age, and our issue after us, as long as the earth yields empty places to be replenished” (p. 2). As long as the earth yields empty places to be replenished. With the last clause, it suddenly becomes apparent that the endless deferral of fulfillment in romance is not the antithesis of empire but in the case of Western colonialism its scriptural genesis.

II

In order to develop these points let me begin with Satan's journey to the New World. As Martin Evans demonstrated in a brilliantly succinct analysis over twenty years ago, there is abundant evidence to suggest that the journey parodies a colonial venture.⁹ The project that governs the poem's satanic plot is the discovery and colonization of a new land. It is true that in one version of this plan colonization is understood simply as a means of precipitating the land's destruction, but much more insistently it is imagined as a permanent settlement. Beelzebub talks of possessing “All as our own,” of driving out “as we were driven, / The punie habitants” (II, 366-67). Satan imagines dwelling secure “in some milde Zone” where “the soft delicious Air” shall breathe her balm and heal his scars (II, 397-402). This satanic colonizing project is mediated through multiple frames of reference: classical, biblical, and of course, not least, contemporary. The journey to the New World is, for instance, repeatedly described in terms of recent overseas “adventures” for trade or settlement. As Satan approaches the gates of hell he is seen as a fleet of merchant ships returning from the East Indies, Bengal, or the Spice Islands (II, 636-42); as he approaches Paradise he is imagined on board ship, sailing from the Cape of Good Hope and cheered by the spicy odors of Arabia (IV, 159-65); and, most important, when he finally encounters the naked inhabitants of the New World, he speaks the words any patriotic Englishman in the late 1650s would expect a rapacious adventurer or conquistador to let slip:

And should I at your harmless innocence
Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just,
Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg'd,
By conquering this new World, compels me now
To do what else though damnd I should abhorre.

(IV, 338-92)

In the event, in what seems like a ringing indictment of colonialist ambition, honor and empire are shown to mean fraud and dispossession; the poor natives are cheated of their birthright and fall prey to the ghastly hellhounds of Sin and Death.

At this point, it is important to emphasize that, despite Quint's assertion to the contrary, the early modern discourse of English colonialism was consistent in its efforts to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate activity.¹⁰ Though much of this moralizing was of course disingenuous, much of it was agonizingly sincere, and in The Reason of Church-government (1642) Milton himself contributes to the debate when he deploys a colonial metaphor to distinguish himself from the Bishops. When it comes to bearing God's truth, the difference between the Bishops and himself is the difference between two kinds of colonial entrepreneur: on the one hand there are those false merchants who “abuse the people, like poor Indians with beads and glasses,” while on the other there are those resolute adventurers who bear themselves honestly at the trading post, “uprightly in this their spiritual factory,” offering stones of “orient lustre” at bargain prices, “at any cheap rate, yea for nothing to them that will” ([The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York, 1931-38). Hereafter cited as] CM III, pp. 229-30). Thus, at the same time that he is justifying himself for speaking out against the Bishops, he is also justifying colonial trade by distinguishing the true from the false. In effect, he is offering his own merchant class an idealized view of itself, tacitly accepting the legitimacy of establishing factories or trading colonies like those set up at Jamestown in Virginia (1607) or Surat in India (1612).¹¹

The metaphor of treasure, the stones of “orient lustre,” the pearl of great price (Matt. xiii, 45-46), is especially relevant because the image is a staple of those tracts and pamphlets whose main purpose is to demonstrate the lawfulness of colonization. As Milton gives this image of “heavenly traffic” a colonial setting to dramatize his religious vocation, so propagandists deploy it to lend the religious aspirations of their readers a colonial outlet. We offer native peoples “the incomparable treasure of the trueth of Christianity and of the Gospell,” says Richard Hakluyt, “while we use and exercise common trade with their merchants.” We “doe buy of them the pearles of the earth,” says the Virginia Company's True Declaration, “and sell to them the pearls of heaven.”¹² In practice, of course, the pearls of heaven often got lost in the rush for the pearls of the earth. In 1622, for instance, an English fleet from the East India Company's factory at Surat joined forces with a Moslem army from Persia to bloodily relieve the Christian Portuguese of that pearl of the orient, Ormus, the center of the Persian Gulf pearl trade.¹³ For Milton such excess is to be censured, and it is precisely for reasons of excess that “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind” is associated with Satan (II, 1-5). Milton's pride in English colonial adventure and his disapproval of mercantile excess are simultaneously made explicit in his Brief History of Muscovia (1682): “The discovery of Russia by the northern Ocean, made first, of any Nation that we know, by English men, might have seem'd an enterprise almost heroick; if any higher end than the excessive love of Gain and Traffick, had animated the design” ([Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: 1953-82). Hereafter cited as] YP VIII, p. 524).

The class into which Milton was born, it needs to be remembered, was mercantile. The parish of All Hallows, Bread Street, London, the first social group of which the poet became conscious, was largely composed of successful merchants, more than half of them dealers in cloth, and many, including Milton's maternal grandfather, members of the Merchant Taylors' Company.¹⁴ His next-door neighbor, Ralph Hamor, was a merchant-tailor but also a member of the Virginia Company and his son, also called Ralph, wrote one of the best known defenses of the colony, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615). The rector of the parish in 1626 was Samuel Purchas, whose great collection of colonizing voyages, Purchas His Pilgrimes, Milton combed through for his history of Russia and is said to have planned to abridge.¹⁵ For people like this, whether domestic merchants or members of overseas companies, the commonplace shorthand or metonym for colonial excess was Spanish imperialism.

From the first English translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas's Brevisima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias in 1583,¹⁶ English colonialism had defined itself in opposition to Spain's excessive love of gain and traffic—a lust for land and treasure which, according to Las Casas, had led to a series of genocidal atrocities. Las Casas's detailed account of these cruelties enabled the English to represent themselves as a kinder, gentler type of colonialist, indeed as protectors of the Indians.¹⁷ Throughout his 1596 tract, The Discovery of Guiana, for instance, Sir Walter Ralegh presents himself to his readers as a knight from Spenserian romance come to do Gloriana's bidding by protecting the Indians from the depredations of the Spanish:

I made them understand that I was a servant of a Queene, who was the great Casique of the north, and a virgin, and had more Casiqui under her then there were trees in their Iland: that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyrannie and oppression, and that she … had sent me to free them. … I shewed them her maiesties picture which they so admired and honored, as it had beene easie to have brought [thought] them Idolatrous thereof.¹⁸

This self-representation is part of a continuous tradition of national propaganda from the 1580s to the late 1650s, and it impinges directly on Milton's career. Between 1655 and 1658, while Milton was still employed on government business, and at about the same time, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, that he was beginning work on Paradise Lost, the rhetoric of Spanish colonial abuse was redeployed in a concerted effort to justify Cromwell's Western Design—that is, his plan to carve out a colonial empire in the Caribbean.¹⁹ In Sir William Davenant's 1658 masque, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, for instance, the New Model Army, complete with red coats, arrives to rescue the racked and tortured Incas in a vision of things to come. In The Tears of the Indians, the 1656 translation of Las Casas's pamphlet made by Milton's other nephew, John Phillips, Cromwell appears making ready to avenge the Indians—for they had been devoured by the Spanish, “not as if they had been their Fellow-Mortals, but like Death it self.”²⁰ And in the official 1655 Declaration Against Spain, which may or may not have been written by Milton, the self-imposed English obligation to avenge the blood of so many slaughtered Indians becomes a warrant by which the English can legitimately inherit Indian land.²¹

Given the immediacy and intensity of this tradition, given Milton's social background and his participation in articulating government policy (including his work on an abortive colonial treaty with the Spanish), it seems unlikely that his critique of colonial abuses in Paradise Lost would be uninfluenced by what the Spanish in self-defense called the Black Legend. And indeed if it is uninfluenced by it, then the significance of Milton's explicit characterization of the Spanish as “Geryons Sons” (XI, 410) at the only moment in the poem when the politics of contemporary colonialism is directly referred to remains unclear. For there on the mountaintop of Speculation, as Adam is shown the future empires of the world, Milton rehearses the argument of Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana: the riches of Mexico and Peru are juxtaposed with the “yet unspoil'd” riches of Guiana, “whose great Citie Geryons Sons / Call El Dorado” (XI, 409-11). In Spenser, Geryon's son is the monstrous progeny of Spanish imperialism devouring the children of the Netherlands; in Milton, “Geryons Sons” is an allusion to a specific historical example of the way contemporary colonialism may reenact the entry of Death itself into the world.²²

John Phillips's description of Spanish excess as “Death it self,” of the Spanish murdering Indians “to satisfie the contemptible hunger of their Hounds” (sig. A8^r), suggests the degree to which the representation of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost continues the colonial critique. One of the distinguishing features of Las Casas's text is the recurrent reference to the Spanish use of war dogs, “which they teach and instruct to fall upon the Indians and devour them” (p. 130). In Paradise Lost, the denouement of Satan's conquest of the New World is the arrival of Sin and Death as hellhounds specifically charged by “the folly of Man” (X, 619) to devour the inhabitants: “See with what heat these Dogs of Hell advance / To waste and havoc yonder World,” cries God the Father (X, 616-17). What is most important here is that Death and the havoc he causes are not the necessary outcomes of colonialism but of the perversion of colonialism, of excess, fraud, and dispossession, that is, of Sin. The extent to which the colonial triumph of Sin and Death is a counterfeit imitation of the good is suggested in the way their satanic charter is made to parody the colonial ideal of Genesis i, 28:

                                                                                right down to Paradise descend;
There dwell and Reign in bliss, thence on the Earth
Dominion exercise and in the Aire,
Chiefly on Man, sole Lord of all declar'd,
Him first make sure your thrall, and lastly kill.

(X, 398-402)

III

The strongest argument for doubting Milton's conversion to any kind of blanket anticolonial stand is not, as I have just tried to suggest, that his satire on colonialism can so easily be construed as a satire on its abuses, but that his depiction of Adam and Even in Paradise turns out to be such a powerful representation of its ideal. And because that ideal has the quality of a romance, it undermines the explanatory force of Quint's binary opposition between the political implications of epic and romance.

The most obvious difference between Satan's colonial project and that of Adam and Eve is explained by Sir Francis Bacon: “I like a Plantation in a Pure Soile; that is, where people are not displanted, to the end, to Plant in Others. For else it is rather an Extirpation, then a Plantation.”²³ Satan does not have a pure soil; Adam and Eve do. Satan and his fellow adventurers are forced to rehearse various self-serving arguments to extirpate the territorial rights of the natives: they are “punie,” puis né, born later, says Beelzebub (II, 367); “Into our room … advanc't,” says Satan (IV, 359). Their very chthonic origins are turned against them: they are denigrated as people of clay, children of despite, as though they were tainted by the ground out of which they had come (IX, 176). Adam and Eve, however, have no need for such arguments. Not only do they have a pure soil, but the world they enter conforms in almost every way with the ideal of English colonial discourse. If the New World of that discourse is frequently recreated in the image of a biblical paradise, so Milton's biblical Paradise is indebted to his familiarity with colonial accounts of the New World.²⁴ The land Adam and Eve enter is gendered female, virginal, and stands ready to be husbanded. It is a place like Robert Johnson's Virginia, where “valleys and plaines … [stream] with sweete Springs, like veynes in a naturall bodie,” where the soil is so strong and lusty that it “sendeth out naturally fruitfull vines running upon trees, and shrubbes.” It is place like Samuel Purchas's Virginia of such “luxuriant wantonesse” that it is well “worth the wooing and loves of the best Husband.”²⁵ Adam and Eve are imagined like the settlers of Virginia, not only as husbandmen, but paradoxically as the plants to be husbanded: they are rooted in the soil, “earth-born” (IV, 360), like the vine and the elm, indigenous, almost autochthonous. But most important, like Purchas's settlers, they have the charter of Genesis i, 28, “a Commission from … [God] to plant” (XIX, pp. 218-19). “Not only these fair bounds,” says Milton's God to Adam, amplifying the biblical text,

                                                                                but all the Earth
To thee and to thy Race I give; as Lords
Possess it, and all things that therein live,
Or live in Sea, or Aire, Beast, Fish, and Fowle.
In signe whereof each Bird and Beast behold
After thir kindes; I bring them to receave
From thee thir Names, and pay thee fealtie
With low subjection.

(VIII, 338-45)

What is most seductive about this fantasy of world dominion is that it articulates both the complete possession of power and its deferral. For in Milton's fiction not only Adam and Eve's nether empire but the Garden itself has to be replenished and subdued, that is, cultivated. Adam and Eve are confronted with “a Wilderness of sweets” where nature “Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will / Her Virgin Fancies” (V, 294-96): as Eve explains,

                                                                                what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wilde.

(IX, 209-12)

Their struggle to cultivate the wilderness is, as in any other early modern colonial romance, a metonym for the struggle toward civility. Implicit in Adam's response to Eve's plan to divide their labors is the suggestion that she has overemphasized the vehicle at the expense of the tenor, the gardening at the expense of the civility it is meant to convey: “Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd / Labour” (IX, 235-36) so as to debar them from the daily delights of civil intercourse—“whether food, or talk between, / Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse / Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow” (IX, 237-39). As their ensuing quarrel indicates, with its carefully plotted account of the disintegration of the language of politeness, civility is understood not simply as refreshment or relief from work but as a different kind of work—a community-defining social practice that takes skill and energy, an art that needs to be joined to nature. Because this task is at the heart of their quest, the failure of Adam and Eve is causally linked to their subsequent moral and epistemological failures, that is, the collapse of civility is not accidental but central to Milton's representation of the Fall.

My point here is twofold: first, that what is frustrated or deferred in Milton's story of Adam and Eve is the desire for a culturally specific form of civility and the membership of the ideal, imagined community it signifies; and second, that this desire is the lack that most powerfully animates early modern colonial settlement at its most idealistic: “if bare nature be so amiable in its naked kind,” wonders Robert Johnson of his brave new world, “what may we hope, when Arte and Nature both shall joyne, and strive together.”²⁶ It is a solipsistic desire because it is a longing for the ideal form of a civility that already identifies colonists as English, Christian, European. It is a desire that renders the literary historian's distinction between epic's imagined completion of history and romance's imagined wandering toward that completion relatively insignificant. It is not clear, for instance, that Ralegh's digressive and ultimately fruitless Spenserian quest in The Discoverie of Guiana—as much a courtly demonstration of temperance as a search for El Dorado²⁷—is any less a manifestation of Western imperialism's will-to-power than the Aeneid or the Lusiads. Both epic and romance are perfectly capable of articulating an imperial ideology.²⁸

If one of the ways in which ideology may be understood is as “identity-thinking,” that is, as the network of “discursive formations” that give a particular culture or community its coherence or integrity, then ideology in Paradise Lost may be most usefully approached through the discourse of civility.²⁹ The civility that constitutes the daily practice of Adam and Eve is, however, more than just a discourse in the sense of one particular tradition; it is more like a master code that generates and demands adherence to a series of moral and epistemological rules so deeply ingrained as to be hardly open to question—rules such as the need to restrain the luxuriant growth of wanton fancy, to subdue sensual appetite, and to maintain the sovereignty of reason (IX, 1127-31).³⁰ These imperatives are aestheticized in art's power “to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune” (The Reason of Church-government, CM III, p. 238). As Ferdinand in The Tempest, in what many claim to be Shakespeare's colonial romance, unwittingly bears witness, such civility so aesthetically conceived is precisely the end of Prospero's art: the magician's strange and rare music crept by him on the waters, he says, “Allaying both their fury and my passion / With its sweet air” (I, ii, 392-94).³¹ For both Milton and Shakespeare, civility so understood is not relative, particular, or contingent, but absolute and universal, in Milton's case especially empyreal and imperial.

What needs to be emphasized at this point is the degree to which the early modern discourse of civility is contingent, from our perspective both culturally specific and solipsistic. In colonial narratives this may be seen most tellingly in those moments of wonder when what is discovered is not the disconcerting strangeness of the other so much as an idealized form of the familiar in the midst of the other. Contrary to Stephen Greenblatt's argument, in epiphanies of wonder ideology is just as likely to be reasserted as resisted.³² What most moves Ralegh, for instance, is not the incomprehensibility or alterity of Guiana, but marvellous moments of recognition like this:

On both sides of the river, we passed the most beautiful countrie that ever mine eies beheld: and whereas all that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, bushes, and thornes, heere we beheld plaines of twenty miles in length, the grasse short and greene, and in divers parts groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose and stil as we rowed, the Deere came downe feeding by the waters side, as if they had been used to a keepers call.

(p. 48)

The same discovery of a civility so wonderful because of its unexpected familiarity is recounted by George Percy as he and his companions negotiate the labyrinthine woods of Nevis in the West Indies:

We past into the thickest of the Woods where we had almost lost our selves, we had not gone above half a mile amongst the thicke, but we came into a most pleasant Garden, being a hundred square paces on every side … we saw the goodliest tall trees growing about the Garden, as though they had beene set by Art, which made us marvel very much to see it.³³

In Paradise Lost, Milton's immersion in colonial discovery narratives is evident in the way he reproduces the same wonderful moment of recognition. What we discover in his Paradise, so remote in time and exotic in location, is not so much a transcendent ideal as an idealized English quotidian. Following Satan, traveling east of Eden, beyond the undergrowth “so thick entwin'd” of “shrubs and tangling bushes,” the “new wonder” that greets us is “A happy rural seat of various view” (IV, 174-76, 205, 247)—“almost laughably,” says John Broadbent, registering his own moment of recognition, “the England of Penshurst, Cooper's Hill, and Appleton House.”³⁴ The civility Adam and Eve seek and lose is precisely what Milton himself cannot give up. It is a discourse so pervasive and constitutive of other discourses—moral, epistemological, aesthetic—that it functions as his habitus; that is, in Pierre Bourdieu's explanation of ideology, the complex of “principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends”—in Eagleton's words, “the relay or transmission mechanism by which mental and social structures become incarnate in daily social activity.”³⁵

If the implication of Adam and Eve in a colonial romance is as deep rooted as I am suggesting, then one might expect their failure to be represented in terms of the ultimate colonial failure of civility, that is, of “going native.” The fear that animates English colonial texts as diverse as Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, or John Rolfe's letter explaining his marriage to Pocahontas, is the fear of degeneration, of becoming savage, of being excluded from the civil community.³⁶ And that is, of course, exactly the fate that overtakes Adam and Eve. In their fall, the first settlers are metamorphosed into Indians. The difference between guilt and shame is the difference between moral failure on the one hand and social transgression and exclusion on the other.³⁷ At their most intense moment of shame, Adam and Eve are excluded from the community into which they were born: “How shall I behold the face / Henceforth of God or Angel,” cries Adam, “O might I here / In solitude live savage” (IX, 1080-81, 1084-85). In attempting to cover their “uncleanness” with fig leaves, they only confirm their excluded, degenerate status: “O how unlike / To that first naked Glorie,” comments the poet. Now in their shame they look like the American Indians “Columbus found … so girt / With featherd Cincture, naked else and wilde / Among the Trees on Iles and woodie shores” (IX, 1114-18). For Milton, guilt and shame seem inseparable. That the Fall, the original moral failure of all humankind, is imagined in terms of what for many of us now is largely a matter of the cultural difference of a specific part of humankind suggests the degree to which moral failure in Milton cannot be imagined in terms other than those of the failure of civility or community transgression. Adam and Eve have not only broken God's commandment, but they have become the defining other of English or European culture. Covered with fig leaves, they imagine themselves back within the community—“Thus fenc't, and as they thought, thir shame in part / Coverd” (IX, 1119-20)—when in fact they are still outside the fence, beyond the pale: “distemperd,” “estrang'd,” “tost and turbulent” (IX, 1131, 1132, 1126).

To the extent that Adam and Eve are capable of regeneration, however, so the colonial quest can continue, and, as the evidence of American colonial writers like Cotton Mather suggests, the image of these first settlers will inspire generations of English colonists on their errand into the wilderness. In his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), for instance, Mather imagines the garden as New England overgrown and threatened by Satan and his followers in the form of the Indians:

About this time New-England was miserably Briar'd in the Perplexities of an Indian War; and the Salvages, in the East part of the Country, issuing out from their inaccessible Swamps, had for many Months made their Cruel Depredations upon the poor English Planters, and surprized many of the Plantations on the Frontiers, into Ruin. … They [the English] found, that they were like to make no weapons reach their Enswamped Adversaries, except Mr. Milton could have shown them how

To have pluckt up the Hills with all their Load,
Rocks, Waters, woods, and by their shaggy tops,
Up-lifting, borne them in their Hands, therewith
The Rebel Host to've over-whelm'd.(38)

IV

Milton as a poet against empire is too easy. In his “Digression on the Long Parliament,” which he sought to publish with his History of Britain long after the Restoration in 1670, Milton urges his readers to learn the lessons of political failure.³⁹ Unless the conduct of affairs is given to “men more then vulgar,” he says, men “bred up … in the knowledge of Antient and illustrious deeds, invincible against money, and vaine titles,” men whose minds are “well implanted with solid & elaborate breeding,” then “wee shall else miscarry still and com short in the attempt of any great enterprise” (YP V, p. 451). Though this was written in 1649, the fact that Milton wanted it published in 1670 does not suggest that he was someone who had given up on England's need to cultivate its nether empire. This is even more apparent in his last polemical pamphlet, Of True Religion (1673), in which he proudly recalls England's defining act of independence in throwing off the “Babylonish Yoke” of the pope's authority and happily joins in the common work of the nation in hindering “the growth of this Romish Weed”: “I thought it no less then a common duty to lend my hand, how unable soever, to so good a Purpose” (YP VIII, pp. 430, 417-18).

The locus classicus for the quietist Milton's rejection of empire is Jesus' excoriation of the Roman Empire's corruption in Paradise Regained (1671). But Jesus' rejection of Rome turns out to be highly ambiguous. First, the rejection comprises a traditional, humanist civility argument. Jesus makes it clear that though Rome has become degenerate, it had actually started out well: the Romans “who once just, / Frugal, and mild, and temperate, [had] conquer'd well” (IV, 133-34; my emphasis). Thus, presumably, for a state or people bound by the civil imperatives of justice, frugality, mildness, and temperance, it was still possible to conquer well. Second, the affective attraction of power is evident in Jesus' intensely threatening millenarian prophecy:

Know therefore when my season comes to sit
On David's Throne, it shall be like a tree
Spreading and over-shadowing all the Earth,
Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash
All Monarchies besides throughout the world
And of my kingdom there shall be no end.

(IV, 146-51)⁴⁰

The anger of the dispossessed in this apocalyptic passage makes it difficult not to recall D. H. Lawrence's comments on the Book of Revelation: “For Revelation, be it said once and for all, is the revelation of the undying will-to-power in man, and its sanctification, its final triumph.” And as Laura Knoppers has recently shown, the allusions to the Book of Daniel in this prophecy had immediate, aggressively political, “Fifth Monarchy” ramifications for Restoration England.⁴¹

The strongest evidence in Paradise Lost (1674) for Milton's rejection of empire is Michael's quietist admonitions, but the poem's closing books are an act of public humiliation and it is in this context that the archangel's admonitions are best understood. Even then they are every bit as ambiguous as Jesus' rejection of Rome. It is true that Michael encourages Adam to focus on obedience rather than what he once possessed in Paradise, “all the rule, one Empire” (XII, 581), but at the same time Adam makes it clear that the imperial imperative of Genesis i, 28, has not lapsed: “that right we hold / By his donation” (XII, 68-69). It is true, we are somewhat belatedly told, that the imperative was never meant to legitimize “Dominion absolute” of “Man over men” (XII, 68-70), but in Michael's nostalgic glance back at what might have been, Adam's empire is imagined as a patriarchal dominion in which the garden might have been

Perhaps thy Capital Seate, from whence had spred
All generations, and hither come
From all the ends of th'Earth, to celebrate
And reverence thee thir great Progenitor.

(XI, 343-46)

And outside the poem, it is clear that Milton does not stop believing in the necessity for a civil community in which some people will be subject to others: the vulgar will still have to be led, the corrupt punished, the Romish weeded out, the savage civilized, and so on. There is, for instance, no evidence to suggest that Milton ever felt the need to revise his view that the Irish were degenerate and had merely proved their obdurate willfulness by refusing to take advantage of England's “civilizing Conquest” to “improve and waxe more civill” (“Observations upon the Articles of Peace,” YP III, p. 304). Finally, it is true that Michael urges Adam to concentrate on the “paradise within thee, happier farr” (XII, 587), but, if my argument is true, then that admonition to turn inward and forget the expansiveness of the Genesis imperative will be undermined by the logic of daily practice—the quotidian demands of early modern civility. Not least, it will be undermined by the extraordinary, affective power of those demands' ideal representation in Milton's version of Paradise, and the consequent longing or lack that that aesthetic achievement creates in the readers of Milton's great poem.

As all his writings testify, Milton was an intensely idealistic and moral man, and what is most challenging about him, like Las Casas and other putative early modern anticolonialists, is that it is his very virtue, his desire for civility and his refusal of any thoroughgoing relativism, that makes it so difficult for him to stand outside the discourse of colonialism. To argue otherwise is to underestimate the power of ideology and to continue the work of diluting the truly important insights of the political criticism that we associate with cultural materialism and the now much-denigrated new historicism.

Notes

1. John White, The Planter's Plea (London, 1630; rpt. New York, 1968), p. 1.

2. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, 1993). Other works on Milton and early modern colonialism include Robert Ralston Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel (Princeton, 1951); James H. Sims, “Camões' ‘Lusiads’ and Milton's ‘Paradise Lost’: Satan's Voyage to Eden,” in Papers on Milton, ed. Philip Mahone Griffith and Lester F. Zimmerman (Tulsa, 1969); John Milton: Paradise Lost: Books IX-X, ed. J. Martin Evans (Cambridge, 1973), esp. pp. 46-47; I. S. MacLaren, “Arctic Exploration and Milton's ‘Frozen Continent,’” N & Q, new ser. XXXI, no. 3 (1984), 325-26; Gordon Campbell, “The Wealth of Ormus and of Ind,” MQ XXI, no. 1 (1987), 22-23; V. J. Kiernan, “Milton in Heaven,” in Reviving the English Revolution, ed. Geoff Eley and William Hunt (London, 1988), pp. 161-80; Thomas N. Corns, “Milton's Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland Under English Eyes,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 123-34; Andrew Barnaby, “‘Another Rome in the West?’: Milton and the Imperial Republic, 1654-70,” Milton Studies XXX, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, 1993), pp. 67-84; Paul Stevens, “‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism,” Criticism XXXV, no. 3 (1993), 441-61; “Spenser and Milton on Ireland: Civility, Exclusion, and the Politics of Wisdom,” ARIEL XXVI, no. 4 (1995), 151-67; and David Armitage, “John Milton: Poet Against Empire,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage et al. (Cambridge, 1995). I should also mention three unpublished papers: Paul Brophy, “‘So Many Signs of Power and Rule’: Colonial Discourse, Pastoralism, and the Representation of Autochthony in Paradise Lost,” 1990; Balachandra Rajan, “Banyan Trees and Fig Leaves: Some Thoughts on Milton's India,” 1991; and Bruce McLeod, “The ‘Lordly Eye’: Milton's Imperial Imagination,” 1995.

3. Terry Eagleton, “Discourse and Discos,” Times Literary Supplement, 15 July 1994, p. 3.

4. See Peter Brooks, “Frighted with False Fire,” Times Literary Supplement, 26 May 1995, pp. 10-11.

5. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1970), esp. pp. 10-34.

6. Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, 1979), p. 220.

7. David Bromwich, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 279. For Quint's praise of Bromwich's “searching” critique, see Epic and Empire, p. 370.

8. Milton's poetry is quoted from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York, 1931-38), and his prose, unless otherwise indicated, from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953-82). Hereafter cited as CM and YP, respectively.

9. Evans, Paradise Lost: Books IX-X, pp. 46-47.

10. See Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 169: “Unlike the other European nations engaged in imperial and colonial expansion in the New World, the Spaniards seriously worried about the legality and morality of their project.”

11. Much more pointedly, he may also be offering his readers an idealized view of those smaller, domestic merchants who were excluded from overseas commerce by the increasingly Royalist “great Marchants” of the chartered companies. For the rivalry between the two groups, see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton, 1993), esp. pp. 83-89.

12. Richard Hakluyt the younger, Epistle Dedicatory, The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, Vol. II of The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. (1589; rpt. Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1967), p. 400; A True Declaration of the State of Virginia, vol. V of New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, ed. D. B. Quinn, 5 vols. (New York, 1979), p. 250.

13. “And so the Inhabiters of Hormuz doe say, that all the world is a ring, and Hormuz is the stone of it.” “Relations of Ormuz,” in vol. X of Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), 20 vols. (1905-07; rpt. New York, 1965), p. 324. See also Campbell, “The Wealth of Ormus,” pp. 22-23, Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel, pp. 78-79, and Sir William Foster, England's Quest of Eastern Trade (London, 1937), pp. 295-313.

14. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1968), vol. I, pp. 6-8; vol. II, pp. 698-701.

15. See YP VIII, p. 459.

16. M. M. S., The Spanish Colonie (London, 1583); rpt. in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, vol. XVIII, pp. 83-180.

17. Richard Hakluyt the younger sets the tone in his Discourse of Western Planting (London, 1584); rpt. in Original Writings, ed. Taylor, vol. II, pp. 211-326, esp. pp. 257-65. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 151-91, esp. p. 185.

18. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596; rpt. New York, 1968), p. 7. On Ralegh's Spenserian self-representation, see Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations XXXIII (1991): 177-217, esp. 187. See also Mary C. Fuller, “Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana,” Representations XXXIII (1991), 42-64.

19. On the propaganda for the Western Design, see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., XLV, no. 1 (1988): 70-99, and Janet Clare, “The Production and Reception of Davenant's Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru,” MLR XXXIX, no. 4 (1994): 832-41.

20. Sir William Davenant, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, in The Works of Sir William Davenant, 2 vols. (1673; rpt. New York, 1968), vol. II, pp. 103-14, esp. pp. 111-14. John Phillips, The Tears of the Indians (1656; rpt. Stanford, n.d.), sig. A8^v.

21. CM XIII, pp. 509-63, esp. pp. 517, 555. Since J. Max Patrick's rejection in YP V, pp. 711-12, the tide of critical opinion has turned against Milton's authorship of the Declaration. While Kiernan, “Milton in Heaven,” p. 175, and Clare, “Production and Reception,” p. 835, seem unaware that there is an issue, Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies,” p. 94, concludes that the manifesto “was written by a committee headed by Nathaniel Fiennes.” Robert T. Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, Pa., 1993), pp. 99-100, follows Patrick, and Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), p. 279, persuasively argues that Thomas Birch's attribution of the Manifesto to Milton in 1738 was conditioned by impending hostilities with Spain and the parliamentary opposition's desire to enlist the prestige of Milton's name in its attacks on Walpole's reluctance to go to war.

22. See Fallon, Milton in Government, pp. 88-100, 229-46; The Faerie Queene V, x, 8ff.

23. Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations,” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (1625; rpt. Oxford, 1985), p. 106. The same point, but with the added authority of Genesis i, 28, is made in the Declaration Against Spain: “The best Title, that any can have to what they possess in those parts of America, is Plantation and Possession, where there were no Inhabitants, or where there were any, by their consent, or at least in such waste and desolate parts of their Countries, as they are not able in any measure to plant, and possesse; (God having made the world for the use of men, and ordained them to replenish the same.)” (CM XIII, p. 555).

24. Compare Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel, and Joseph E. Duncan, Milton's Earthly Paradise: A Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis, 1972), esp. pp. 188-233, 234-42.

25. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia (London, 1609), in Quinn, New American World, vol. V, p. 239. Compare Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975), esp. pp. 10-25. “Virginias Verger,” in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, vol. XIX, pp. 243, 242.

26. Quinn, New American World, vol. 5, p. 238. On the centrality of civility, see, for instance, Nicholas Canny's seminal article, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. XXX (1973): 575-98.

27. Compare Montrose, “The Work of Gender,” 186-88.

28. For a different way of interpreting the colonial uses of romance, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), esp. pp. 132-33.

29. Especially suggestive is Terry Eagleton's critique of Adorno in Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), esp. pp. 126-27, 221-24, and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), pp. 103-50.

30. Compare Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison, 1985), pp. 11-45, esp. pp. 21-22.

31. Quoted from The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford, 1987). For The Tempest as a colonial romance, see especially Paul Brown, “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 48-71.

32. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 17-19: “The experience of wonder seems to resist recuperation, containment, ideological incorporation.”

33. George Percy, “A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southern Colonie in Virginia” (1606-07), in Quinn, New American World, vol. V, p. 268.

34. John B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on “Paradise Lost” (1960; rpt. London, 1967), p. 184.

35. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif., 1990), p. 53; Eagleton, Ideology, p. 156.

36. Compare Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford, 1970), esp. pp. 63-69, and John Rolfe, “Letter to Sir Thomas Dale,” in Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615; rpt. New York, 1971), pp. 61-68.

37. On the difference between moral rules and pollution rules, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), esp. pp. 129-39.

38. Compare Paradise Lost VI, 644-47. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II, ed. Kenneth B. Murdock (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 298. George F. Sensabaugh, Milton in Early America (Princeton, 1964) is the strongest advocate for the shaping influence of Milton in colonial America. Sensabaugh's views are contested by Keith W. F. Stavely, especially in “The World All Before Them: Milton and the Rising Glory of America,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture XX (1990): 147-64. However, in his effort to distance the poet, whom he considers increasingly antimillenarian and antinationalist, from the imperialism of American revolutionary rhetoric, Stavely inadvertently reveals just how imperial a poem many colonial Americans took Paradise Lost to be. Their “misreading,” if it is one, constitutes eloquent testimony to the poem's ideological force.

39. The “Digression” was written in 1649 and, according to Edward Phillips, could not pass the licensor in 1670. For the complex but fascinating political and textual history of the “Digression,” see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton's “History of Britain”: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 1-21, 22-48, esp. pp. 45-46.

40. Compare Barnaby, “Milton and the Imperial Republic,” pp. 78-81.

41. Lawrence, Apocalypse (1931; rpt. London, 1972), p. 13; Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, Ga., 1994), pp. 123-41, esp. pp. 137-41.