Abstract
This chapter examines the intersection of monstrosity and sexuality in John Milton’s Paradise Lost in order to reveal connections between supernatural coupling and disability within the epic poem. Exploring the sexuality of unfallen and fallen angels reveals how Paradise Lost celebrates not only the inability to recognize others but also the sexual coupling of non-normative bodies. Tracing the linkages that Milton builds between sexuality and lack of recognition yields a more nuanced understanding of the connection between disability and monstrosity, and ultimately reveals new insight into the erotics in Milton’s poem. In the early modern cultural context, a profoundly Christian writer such as John Milton would be expected to understand blindness as a disease to be healed or a problem to be resolved. Yet, intriguingly, he suggests that this disability might be addressed not by “curing” it but by reframing the way in which readers might consider it, shifting readers’ perception of it from an affliction to an enabler of new forms of affection. This chapter ultimately suggests that the poet’s depictions of angelic erotic coupling constitute a celebration of interpersonal relations devoid of visual recognition.
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Notes
- 1.
She goes on to remark that in ParadiseLost “the teeth of Sin’s womb – and by association the painful womb of the female reproductive body – become interlaced with the teeth of Death’s mouth, and the anatomical site of sex and childbirth becomes associated with the ultimate threshold of mortality: the gateway to hell.” Sarah Alison Miller, “Monstrous Sexuality: Varations on the Vagina Dentata,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 317 and 326.
- 2.
Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Palister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. We cannot be certain whether Milton himself read Paré’s work, and I invoke it here to instantiate a certain line of thinking rather than to suggest a direct line of influence. However, Paré’s collected works were published in three editions (including one in Latin) at the end of the sixteenth century, and an English version was published in London in 1634. For a discussion of the wide popularity of this text in the early modern period, see Janis L. Pallister’s introduction to the volume cited here. For a broader discussion of the popularity of stories of monstrous births in early modern England, see Kevin Stagg’s insightful study of over 70 ballads and pamphlets published between 1550 and 1700 on the theme: “Representing Physical Difference: The Materiality of the Monstrous,” in Social Histories of Disabiity and Deformity, ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19–38.
- 3.
Unless otherwise noted, all references to Milton’s writing is drawn from John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).
- 4.
Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 2.
- 5.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 113.
- 6.
McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, 2.
- 7.
The notion that humans might evolve into angels follows Augustine’s assertion that obedience leads to the cleansing of sin and eventual transformation of human bodies into spirits. Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, Volume IV, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pages 321–323, Book 14, Section 10.
- 8.
Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks Before The Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), x.
- 9.
Paré, 3.
- 10.
This translation is my own. The phrase is quoted in Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Milton: Nation and Reception,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 427.
- 11.
Angelica Duran, “The Blind Bard, According to John Milton and His Contemporaries,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46.3 (September, 2013): 152.
- 12.
Duran, 144.
- 13.
The dating of this early poem is uncertain, but it was probably written between 1627 and 1629.
- 14.
In his 17th-century treatise on the workings of the body, Helkiah Crooke describes the condition as “that disease which the Arabians call Gutta serena the cleare drop, [where] the action of seeing is altogether taken away or intercepted.” Helkiah Crooke, Mikrocosmographia (London: W. Jaggard, 1618), 553. For two useful histories of debates about the medical cause of Milton’s blindness, see Eleanor Gertrude Brown, Milton’s Blindness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 1–48, and Arnold Sorsby, “On the Nature of Milton’s Blindness,” British Journal of Opthamology 14.7 (1930): 339–354.
- 15.
All discussions of English word meanings draw from Oxford English Dictionary Online,www.oed.com
- 16.
Simone Chess, “Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Performance and Print,” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hopgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013), 106.
- 17.
Diane Purkiss, “What Do Men Want? Satan, the Rake, and Masculine Desire,” Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts, ed. Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 188.
- 18.
“Epistolarum Familiarum Liber, XV: Leonardo Philare Atheniensi” in John Milton, Latin Writings: A Selection, ed. and trans. John K. Hale (Tempe: MRTS, 1998), 202–203.
- 19.
All discussions of Latin word meanings draw from the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
- 20.
Crooke, 535.
- 21.
Quoted in John Milton: Introductions, ed. John Broadbent (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press 1973),
- 22.
Jeffrey Masten “Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.3 (2004): 367–384.
- 23.
The illness of his eyes is linked to pain and illness in the rest of his body, yet the full onset of blindness returns him to otherwise full health. John Milton, Latin Writings, 198–199.
- 24.
John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 317.
- 25.
William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983), 166.
- 26.
In the Nativity Ode, Milton describes God’s “far-beaming blaze” as “light insufferable” (8–9). Yet he opens Book 3 of Paradise Lost with the address “Hail holy light” as he asks to “express” this “eternal Coeternal beam” (3.1–3).
- 27.
For further discussion of sightlessness granting forms of vision, see David Quint “‘Things Invisible to Mortal Sight’: Light, Vision, and the Unity of Book 3 of ‘Paradise Lost,’” Modern Language Quarterly (September 2010): 245.
- 28.
Patrick White, “Sex Education; Or, How the Blind Became Heterosexual,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.1–2 (2003): 140–141.
- 29.
Stephen Guy-Bray, “‘Fellowships of Joy’: Angelic Union in Paradise Lost,” Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 10 (2014): 2.
- 30.
White, 141.
- 31.
Shildrick Margrit, Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity, and Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84.
- 32.
Anna Mollow, “Is Sex Disability? Queer Theory and the Disability Drive,” in Sex and Disability, ed. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 295, 297.
- 33.
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
- 34.
Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 196.
- 35.
Eric B. Song, “Love Against Substitution: John Milton, Aphra Behn and the Political Theology of Conjugal Narratives,” ELH 80.3 (Fall 2013): 682 (681–714).
- 36.
Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 186.
- 37.
Chess, 106.
- 38.
Guy-Bray, “‘Fellowships of Joy’: Angelic Union in Paradise Lost,” 9.
- 39.
Leo Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” UMBR(a): A Journal of the Unconcious (2002): 11.
- 40.
Bersani, 21.
- 41.
He notes that the early modern period introduced new social arrangements such as urban crowding that “brought bodies together in such a way as to offer at least the opportunity for intimacy to be understood in terms of corporeal proximity and even anonymity rather than intersubjective knowledge.” James Bromley, Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14.
- 42.
Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr., “‘A Prescript Order of Life’: Memory, Sexuality, Selfhood,” in Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England, ed. John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 241.
- 43.
Maureen Quilligan, Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 6.
- 44.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, “Beauty and the Freak,” in Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture, ed. Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Joy Epstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 181.
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Garrison, J.S. (2019). Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost. In: Godden, R.H., Mittman, A.S. (eds) Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2_13
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