Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500-1700 QUEER MILTON Edited by DAVID L. ORVIS Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 Series Editors Jean Howard Department of English Columbia University New York, NY, USA Ivo Kamps General University of Mississippi University, MS, USA In the twenty first century, literary criticism, literary theory, historiogra- phy and cultural studies have become intimately interwoven, and the for- merly distinct fields of literature, society, history, and culture no longer seem so discrete. The Early Modern Cultural Studies series encourages scholarship that crosses boundaries between disciplines, time periods, nations, and theoretical orientations. The series assumes that the early modern period was marked by incipient processes of transculturation brought about through exploration, trade, colonization, and the migra- tion of texts and people. These phenomena set in motion the processes of globalization that remain in force today. The purpose of this series is to publish innovative scholarship that is attentive to the complexity of this early modern world and bold in the methods it employs for studying it. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14956 David L. Orvis Editor Queer Milton Editor David L. Orvis Boone, NC, USA Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 ISBN 978-3-319-97048-6 ISBN 978-3-319-97049-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97049-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950513 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: THEPALMER/Getty This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P reface This project began as a special issue of Early Modern Culture co-edited with Will Stockton. Our aim in that 2014 volume was to challenge what we perceived then as the critical and theoretical orthodoxy of much Milton criticism, particularly its resistance to the kinds of queer interpre- tive frameworks that have elsewhere animated and enriched Renaissance studies. Indebted to pioneering anti-heteronormative readings of Milton, emboldened by the rise of the New Milton Criticism, “Queer Milton” sought to extend previous lines of inquiry into the unstable forma- tions of gender and sexuality in Milton’s corpus.1 In “An Introduction Justifying Queer Ways,” Stockton notes that the collected essays “demonstrate particular analytical purchases the concept of queerness can make on just some recurrent questions in Milton Studies.” These questions in turn raise others: “Is Milton’s Christianity hostile to queer expression? Is it the task of the critic to make Milton’s work ideologically coherent? And why has Milton Studies been so far relatively unaffected by the queer turn in Early Modern (especially Shakespeare) Studies?”2 Attributing the dearth of queer interventions in Milton criticism to its perceived insularity as a field, Stockton concludes, “Whether Milton Studies remains such a divided place depends in part on whether it can accommodate the queers.”3 Contributors to the special issue were given no guidance beyond our general topic and title. Much to our delight, contributions examined a range of works from a variety of queer perspectives. In the lead essay, the first and only on Paradise Lost, Stephen Guy-Bray locates Milton’s v vi PREfACE queerness in the angelic sodomy that precedes and surpasses human sex- uality. David Orvis’s essay, the second in the volume, posits a conceptu- alization of queer mutuality forged against hegemonic institutions in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. If Guy-Bray and Orvis read queerness in positive, even radical terms, then a second pair of essays by Melissa Sanchez and Drew Daniel explore aversions to queer in other works by Milton. Sanchez focuses on chastity and the flight from rationality in A Mask, Daniel on effeminacy and the negative affects of shame and anx- iety in Samson Agonistes. The issue concludes with Victoria Silver’s elo- quent response, “An Apology for Queering Milton,” which enjoins us to rethink Miltonic notions of embodiment. Tracking Milton’s ponderings over creatural life and embodied experience across a wide array of polem- ical works, including De Doctrina Christiana, Silver maps out a persis- tent concern with the relation between self and body: for Milton, selem elohim not only emphasizes the legitimacy of scriptural anthropomorphism, which we cannot controvert, but also the dignity of the human being, including the human body, to whose order of creatural exist- ence its creator adapts his words, and enfolds his nature in the incarnation. In short, for Milton, scripture’s way of speaking shows us how, miracles hav- ing ceased, to find God in the world, which is neither by confining signifi- cance to the superficial or ostensible sense of things, nor by denying their embodied, circumstantial force in favor of a wholesale metaphysical transla- tion. If I may put it this way, God is always an implication of experience, as Milton explains in the first pages of Christian Doctrine, within phenomena but never the same as them, owing to the insuperable distinction between creature and creator, the caused and the causeless, finite and infinite.4 In addition to providing further grounds for pursuing anti-heteronormative readings of Milton, these essays exemplify just a few possible trajectories for future queer Milton criticism. If our framing of the “Queer Milton” special issue reflected (at least on the editors’ part) a degree of apprehension about its likely reception among Miltonists, the present collection appears largely in response to the generous and generally positive feedback that issue elicited. Upon receiving the Milton Society of America’s Irene Samuel Award, my co-editor and I started to discuss in earnest what a book-length incar- nation of this project might look like. This book represents the fruits of those discussions, and I cannot thank Will Stockton enough for his support in this latest endeavor and, of course, for agreeing to write the PREfACE vii afterword. In an effort to widen the scope of queer Milton studies, this volume comprises seven original essays as well as revised and refined versions of those that first appeared in the 2014 issue of Early Modern Culture. following Erin Murphy’s edifying foray into the queer Milton criticism that never happened, Queer Milton’s contents fall into two per- haps overly broad categories—Part I on “Eroticism and form,” Part II on “Temporality and Affect”—in recognition of queer studies’ consti- tutive messiness. Each essay understands queerness in its own way, and as Stockton notes in the book’s afterword, the cumulative effect is not some grand narrative about a so-called queer author, but a multiplicity of queer readings, each producing their own queer Milton. Even so, the collection’s organization announces in rather general terms some recur- rent conceptual fields under investigation here. Essays in Part I share an interest in erotic form—which is to say, forms of erotic entanglement and attachment and the literary and textual forms through which they find expression. If such concerns find their way into the book’s latter half, essays in Part II nonetheless command a shift in focus toward consid- erations of temporality and affect in normative regimes of gender and sexuality. There is significant potential for overlap here, and one might notice the well-worn terrain of Paradise Lost in both the opening chap- ter of Part I and the concluding chapter of Part II. This same distance, however, transports from seemingly familiar territory in queer reading practices (Luxon) to a hitherto unexplored geology of exhausted life (Swarbrick). But, of course, not everyone will follow this path through the book, and different roadmaps can afford us different views of its queer landscape. Thus loosely defined, Queer Milton’s organizing principles suggest a few of the book’s engagements with recent conversations in Milton studies and in queer early modern studies. Heeding Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy’s call “for a more porous Miltonism,” the present collection exploits the terminological indeterminacy of queer to gather methodologically diverse essays.5 Interpretive frameworks for queering temporality and affect are especially varied, incorporating insights from wide-ranging theoretical works to elucidate, in this section’s four chap- ters, chastity and chronopolitics in A Mask (Sanchez), communal shame and national identity in Paradise Lost (Pivetti), effeminacy and terror in Samson Agonistes (Daniel), and the exhaustion of bodies and tropes in Paradise Lost (Swarbrick). As in Gray and Murphy’s Milton Now, con- tributions to Queer Milton “guide the direction of the collection in viii PREfACE divergent and productively conflicted ways.”6 Whereas Guy-Bray exam- ines angelic intimacy alongside early modern discourses of sodomy and masculine friendship, Orvis explores articulations of intimacy that are legible as queer precisely in their defiance of institutional forms such as friendship and marriage. Together, the essays provoke questions about the queerness of early modern discursive formations, and hence, too, about the proximity of queer to antinormativity.7 In her ruminations about the state of the field, Murphy takes up Orvis’s reading of Milton’s deployment of Anteros in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce to show what is lost in his “reparative” approach (to quote Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). Offering her own “paranoid” reading of allusions to Anteros, Murphy amply demonstrates not the superiority of one queer herme- neutic over the other, but rather the crucial importance of both ways of reading in a more robust queer Milton criticism. The present collection seeks to build on previous anti-heteronor- mative Milton scholarship while also delineating new areas of inquiry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, several chapters pick up threads of germinal queer and feminist readings of Paradise Lost. One such thread is the sta- tus of pre- and postlapsarian human sexuality and marriage embodied in Adam and Eve. In addition to enlarging the range of sources, both bib- lical and extra-biblical, for Milton’s representation of sex and compan- ionship prior to and after the fall, queer critiques have questioned the normativity, and indeed the primacy, of Adam and Eve’s encounters in Eden.8 In Thomas Luxon’s contribution to Queer Milton, the Genesis account of creation is revealed as a kind of supplement to the Edenic pre-beginnings imagined in Paradise Lost. The pre-first elements of Milton’s Eden posit a queer poetics that destabilizes biblical orthodoxy, particularly when it comes to the poem’s treatment of marriage and sex- ual difference. Kyle Pivetti examines shame and memory in Milton’s epic, arguing that when Adam and Eve consume the forbidden fruit, they enter into time divided between pre- and postlapsarian. founded on and structured by shameful memories and communal shame, this entrance provides the conditions for a national identity constructed around narratives of misogyny, difference, and marriage. If Luxon and Pivetti stop short of Will Stockton’s declaration, in an essay published in Queer Renaissance Historiography, that, in Lacanian terms at least, heter- osexuality fails in Paradise Lost, they nevertheless problematize in quite different ways the hegemonic status of marriage and heteroeroticism in Milton’s epic.9 PREfACE ix Other chapters in the book revisit discussions of angelic intimacy in Paradise Lost. Mounting an important corrective to studies that view Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian sexuality as a conjugal ideal, path-break- ing queer analyses of sex between angels have placed this dynamic at the center of Milton’s cosmic order.10 As mentioned above, Guy-Bray draws on overlapping Renaissance discourses of sodomy and friendship to unpack depictions of celestial union in Paradise Lost. In Guy-Bray’s read- ing, this non-reproductive and ungendered angelic love is the poem’s paradigmatic sexuality—one which humans can only ever aspire to and imitate. Lara Dodds relates Adam and Raphael’s conversation about angelic sexuality in Book 8 of Paradise Lost to two late-twentieth-century works—Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series and Raphael Carter’s cyberpunk novel The Fortunate Fall—to illustrate just some of the pos- sibilities for fantasy and science fiction as genres of queer adaptation. In the book’s only chapter devoted to Milton after Milton, Dodds expertly weighs the costs and benefits of queer appropriation for genres and texts beyond the early modern cultural imaginary. Despite their disparate contexts, then, Guy-Bray and Dodds share an interest in increasing our understanding of sexual knowledge derived from Adam and Raphael’s colloquy in Paradise Lost. Elsewhere in the volume, contributors engage queer work on other selections from Milton’s poetry and prose. Sanchez’s investigation of chronopolitics and the idealization of chastity in A Mask intervenes in feminist and queer debates about the poem’s representation of sexuality and desire.11 John Garrison’s exploration of abundance and attraction in the elegies thinks anew the queer, or more specifically homoerotic, res- onances of Milton’s Latin and English elegaic verse.12 Orvis’s contribu- tion situates itself within discussions about the sexual politics of Milton’s divorce tracts.13 And, of course, Murphy’s review of previous queer work surveys a range of verse and prose compositions by Milton. far from exhaustive, these chapters propose new approaches to texts that have elicited queer responses in Milton scholarship. Though not always explicit, essays in the present collection endeavor to bring queer Milton studies into greater conversation with queer early modern studies. Indeed, several essays are informed by ongoing debates about the place of historicism in queer scholarship.14 Corey McEleney concludes his chapter on queer disfigurations in Paradise Lost with a defense of deconstructive modes of queer analysis. Responding chiefly to Valerie Traub’s critiques of the rhetorical comparisons queer theorists