Why is the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained? Given Milton’s rigorously strict Protestant views, which, in the seventeenth century deemphasized to the point of theologically discounting the Virgin, her prominent presence in what was probably Milton’s final work raises interesting questions for a study of the representation of maternal authority as it is deployed in literary plots. Not only is the Virgin a vocal and articulate presence in the plot of Paradise Regained; but, as I will argue, the brief epic precisely and self-consciously establishes the parameters of her maternal authority. It is that authority in its immensity and in its limits which becomes a necessary component in Milton’s particular poetic idea of the heroism of the Son.

Paradise Regained was published in 1671 together with Samson Agonistes. As the two are parallel texts, some initial comparisons between them will help to illuminate the defining issues about the structural role of maternal authority that I am seeking to explain. Each text adapts biblical narratives to tell the story of a divinely born redeemer of his people. Samson and the Son not only have in common divine pedigrees, guaranteed to their mothers by an angelic messenger of God; each also has a miraculous public career, marked by temptation, betrayal, and a redemptive, sacrificial end. Interestingly, in his representation of both careers, Milton chooses episodes that exist outside of the traditional heroic narrative, by which I mean the recounting of active public deeds of adventure—conquest, rule, or rescue—as they unfold in time, enacted and remembered as history. Although Samson’s glorious accomplishments are related in the poem, they are told in flashback: his days of military victory are, pointedly, in the past. Milton instead focuses his drama on the present moment of the hero’s defeat, his existence as a blind slave. He is interested not in Samson’s famous battles, but in the ways in which the hero endures suffering and failure after his conquests are over. If Samson’s public heroism is belated, the Son’s is potential. The encounters between the Son and Satan that comprise most of the action of Paradise Regained precede Christ’s ministry of preaching and healing, revealing instead his inner resistance to temptation; the Son’s public deeds, as yet narratively unrealized, remain in the future. “My time I told thee … / … is not yet come” (III.496-97), he insists. 1

While the two texts are similar in focus and allied in purpose they are, of course, not matching. Samson is a hero of the Hebrew Bible, while the Son emerges from the Gospels. Samson Agonistes is a dramatic poem, which Milton defines as a tragedy. Paradise Regained is a brief epic with a promising end. 2 Possessed of a magnificent physical strength, Samson slays hundreds of thousands of the enemies of the Jews with the jawbone of an ass. Human, and therefore weak, he succumbs to female seduction and is defeated, blinded and taken into slavery, doubted, and betrayed not only by Dalila but by his own people. He nevertheless delivers his people from the Philistine enemy with an act of spectacular violence that is in its moral and even theological implications debatable: is this destruction suicide as well as murder, an act of tyranny and despair, or is it an act of faith and liberation, a sacrifice so stunningly devoted that it justifies all of the deaths it leaves in its wake? The Son also engages in occasional acts of violence, but his heroism is spiritual, internalized, and will eventually involve a ministry of preaching and healing. Arguably the Son endures an agon, moving through the poem darkly until he understands his divine identity by resisting temptation. Insofar as he is human he suffers from doubt and is betrayed by his own people. But in Paradise Regained the hero’s ordeal involves a grasping of origins to which there can be no real threat. Although the Son is alone in the desert and tormented by painful thoughts, there can be no narrative suspense about his ability to resist seduction. Like Samson, he ends his mortal career in an act of miraculous violence that saves others. But Milton does not dramatize the Son’s death, which remains potential in Paradise Regained. In contrast to that of Samson, the Son’s death is perpetrated upon, rather than by him, and its redemptive implications are not historically limited, but infinite.

Theologically (and in terms of interpretation, typologically) the spiritual superiority of the Son’s quest overwhelms that of Samson, improving and expanding immeasurably upon its devotion and its results. Milton’s representation of the comparative superiority of the new Christian dispensation over the old Hebraic law as these are complexly deployed in the quests of the two heroes, along with his conception of heroic action, has been explored extensively. 3 Yet many salient aspects of the two texts which enrich various perspectives on these issues remain virtually unaddressed and certainly unexamined in relation to each other. Significant both in their sweep and their details, the unexamined issues have to do with gender, and particularly with Milton’s representation of maternal and paternal authority and agency. 4 Some further brief comparisons are useful before going on to explore the representation of maternal authority in Paradise Regained.

Samson Agonistes is a dead mother plot, while Paradise Regained is very much a living mother plot. As mentioned, the biblical stories of both heroes begin with the divine annunciation of their births. Although Samson’s mother plays a huge role in Judges (the angel appears to her twice, and both times she is alone), Milton erases this entire biblical drama and focuses on Samson’s relationship with his natural father, Manoa; except for a brief mention of “both my parents” (26), his mother disappears from the story. In contrast, adapting Luke (4:1–13), Paradise Regained recounts or alludes to the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary five times. Not only does Milton virtually erase Joseph, who plays a quite prominent part in Luke, but—even more surprising for reasons I will discuss—the Virgin herself becomes a major character in the poem. At the end of Samson Agonistes the body of the hero, whose exhausted career has ended in his death, is returned “Home to his father’s house” (1733), destined to become a public monument. In contrast the father’s house is seen from a Satanic perspective in Paradise Regained: transporting the Son to the top of the pinnacle, Satan deviously observes, “I to thy father’s house / Have brought thee, and highest placed, highest is best” (4.552-53). Having overcome temptation at the end of the poem, “our Savior meek,” his public life yet to begin, “unobserv’d / Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” (4.636-38). I argue that, given Milton’s intentions to exalt the Son and all he represents, it is critical that he emphasizes privacy and maternal authority and agency at the expense of public heroism and paternal power in Paradise Regained.

Unlike Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained is notoriously devoid of tension. “Narrative suspense and dramatic sympathy go together,” Northrop Frye observes in relation to Paradise Regained; “We have them in Samson Agonistes, but they must be renounced here.” 5 The Son is self-contained, without need of sympathy. His heroism is singular, certain, and in its insistently private, patient, enduring nature, unambivalently gendered female: “who best / Can suffer best can do,” the Son announces, rejecting with moralized finality the power displayed in external deeds (3.194-95).

Scholars long have debated the reasons for the lack of traditional action and narrative suspense in Paradise Regained, connecting this structural peculiarity with the Son’s heroic identity as sui generis. Addressing the issue of plot, Barbara Lewalski is adamant that the Son does undergo a tension-creating agon: “For the encounter between Christ and Satan to constitute a genuine dramatic action and a real conflict, Christ’s character must be conceived in such a way that the test or temptation is real: he must be able to fall, must be capable of growth, and must be genuinely (not just apparently) uncertain of himself.” Yet Stanley Fish brilliantly demonstrates that there is no “real conflict” in Paradise Regained, at least not in the conventional narrative terms Lewalski describes, and that is precisely the point. That the Son’s internal struggles do not manifest themselves in the dramatic tension that traditional action creates is purposeful: any suspense-generating belief that the Son actually could be tempted or fall is counter-intuitive to both the reader’s foreknowledge and experience of the poem. Preoccupation with public action and historical experience are Satanic in Paradise Regained, and throughout the poem it is Satan, not the Son (or the reader), who is unsure of Christ’s true identity as Satan’s successful adversary and the eventual savior of humanity. 6 The Son is not quite certain precisely how he will conduct his career, but his future actions are not the subject of the poem. The Son (unlike Samson) never doubts his mission: “His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength” (1.161).

In what follows I would like to connect the lack of narrative suspense, the unusual static quality of Paradise Regained, to Milton’s representation of maternal authority. Once again, comparisons with Samson Agonistes are revealing. In the Judges narrative (13), the angel of the Lord appears twice to Samson’s barren mother to announce his birth, and both times she is alone. When he does encounter the angel, Samson’s father Manoa fails to recognize him; finally realizing that he is confronting a divine messenger, Manoa assumes wrongly that “we shall surely die, because we have seen God” (13:22). It is Samson’s mother who corrects her husband’s misperception and who goes on to bear and name the baby. Rachel Havrelock’s insights in her essay on barren mothers who eventually, miraculously, give birth to biblical heroes can help shed light on the reasons for Manoa’s cluelessness. The “gap between humanity and God, promise and fulfillment cannot be repaired by male loyalty or devotion, but only by female initiative,” Havrelock explains. “The female journey from barrenness to fertility parallels the migrations through which the patriarchs achieve intimacy with the Divine.” 7 Given the biblical emphasis on the heroic agency of Samson’s mother, it is all the more striking that Milton eliminates her crucial role in her son’s story.

It should be clear that the erasure of mothers from western stories is not in itself surprising, particularly if we consider the omnipresent literary configuration which I have defined as the dead mother plot, in which the mother is either dying or dead. Like all versions of the mother plot, stories in which the mother is dead relate to the gendered distribution of authority in the family. Taking into account the qualifying exceptions discussed in the introduction, maternal authority remains for the most part first and foremost an authority of origin. Second, as the Samson story makes clear, maternity by definition constitutes an authority of knowledge, the mother’s knowledge of authentic fatherhood and the legitimacy of children.

According to the logic of the dead mother plot, Milton’s erasure of Samson’s mother indicates that the hero’s destiny remains to be worked out as an historical experience, by which I mean that it must unfold through action and in time. No maternal presence will impede or alter this process, which conjoins the hero’s individual destiny to public life and cultural forms. Milton dramatizes Samson’s internal struggle in three encounters: with his father, his unfaithful wife Dalila, and the Philistine bully Harapha. The authorities of both Dalila and Harapha are unquestionably discredited, leaving only Manoa to intervene in Samson’s destiny, which he does, tirelessly. Devastated by his son’s suffering, the father tries with unfailing, poignant energy to restore Samson’s status as a triumphant military hero. But Milton represents Manoa’s enthusiastic interventions ambiguously, picking up on the Hebrew Bible’s focus on his cluelessness. Passionately desiring to repair his son’s dignity, Manoa is nevertheless conceptually trapped, insensitive. He cannot listen to Samson’s repeated attempts to explain his internal experience of anguish, dismissing (in one of Milton’s infrequent bad lines) what his son tells him: that the source of his desperate sorrow is not military defeat, but marital failure. “I cannot praise thy marriage choices son,” he retorts, inadequately (420), before changing the subject. When Manoa’s efforts to keep his son alive fail, he does not respond to the Chorus’ eloquent praise for the passive endurance of suffering and rejection of brute strength in its evocation of the female-gendered Phoenix. Instead he remains caught in the failed terms of traditional male heroism, tautologically and so unconvincingly praising Samson’s death as legendary: “Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson, and heroically hath finsh’d / A life Heroic” (1723, 1709–11). Taking the dead Samson home, Manoa wants to build a public monument as a memorial; intending to honor his son’s valiance, he disregards with oblivious sadness Samson’s passionate interiority and desire for privacy.

While there is some pathos to Manoa’s suffering, his sense of loss does not match that of Samson; nor does his conception of heroism provide an adequate correlative to Samson’s experience. Milton grants the ideological edge of moral superiority in the poem to the female heroism of endurance reflectively celebrated by the Chorus, rather than to the generic male version of militant action that Manoa idealizes. Paternal authority in the play is present, but radically compromised. But what of maternal authority? The Chorus represents its image of the regenerative Phoenix as maternal (1699; 1703–07), and Samson evokes God himself as a mother (633–35). 8 Yet there is no actual mother taking part in the text. One result of Milton’s erasure of Samson’s mother is the effect of mysterious ambiguity surrounding Samson’s birth. Samson alludes to his divine origins, his inner promptings, but we never see them dramatized, and, on various occasions, Samson himself seems to question his special relationship to God. In addition there is no representation, even in flashback, of the twice-repeated annunciation that plays so prominent a part in Judges. For the divinity of Samson’s birth we have only the word of the bitter, anguished hero himself, who tends to have serious doubts.

The problems raised in the ambiguous treatment of Samson’s heroism are solved in Milton’s unconflicted representation of the Son in Paradise Regained. As noted, Samson must reckon with an unresolved destiny, to be performed through action and suffering. In contrast, the Son has not a destiny to be worked out, but origins to be recognized. The Son of course will engage in a future plot. But in Paradise Regained Milton does not present that future as constituent of the Son’s heroism. Instead the Son’s heroic identity in the present moment of the poem involves accepting his origins, which exist already; they are definite, rather than ambiguous, profound but uncomplicated; by definition they do not remain to be achieved: rather, they are revealed in order to be understood. Another way to make this point is to say that for the Son, origins and destiny are the same thing: the former contain and make explicit the latter. To clarify this distinction, I would like to return to the idea that maternal authority is an authority of origins and knowledge, both of which take only vague, indefinite form in the motherless text, Samson Agonistes. In Paradise Regained, however, it is the Virgin’s presence that confirms the Son’s origins and provides knowledge of his birth. I am arguing that the prominent presence of the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained is an essential part of the picture that consolidates the Son’s identity, making it perfect: both human and divine.

As suggested earlier, given Milton’s radical Protestantism, it is all the more striking that he should foreground the Virgin Mary in Paradise Regained. In a lively and thorough account, Frances Dolan has traced the trajectory of Marian devotion in Protestant seventeenth-century England and concluded that Protestants saw in the worship of Mary “a radical and blasphemous reorientation.” 9 Moving away decidedly from Catholic theological emphases (treasured in popular piety) on the Virgin Birth and the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, Protestants demoted the worshipful apparatus surrounding Mary, doing away, for example, with the saints and relics that comprised her cult. Insofar as Protestants took notice of Mary, they emphasized her humanity; fearing that worship of the Virgin would rival worship of her son, they directed their attention to Christ alone. 10 In his prose writings Milton aligns himself with standard Protestant thinking on the issue of the Virgin’s humanity. For example, he vehemently denies that Mary could be a cause of salvation for herself or others, indignantly rejecting the idea of her as a divine agent. Instead he praises her for her obedient, reverent political sentiments about human misery, expressed in Luke, and for her status as the ideal wife. 11

Milton virtually ignores Mary’s motherhood per se in the few instances when he mentions the Virgin in his prose. This is all the more interesting, given that, as Dolan shows, it is the idea and representation of Mary’s motherhood that evoke the most fervent anxieties in the seventeenth century. Dolan points out that “Mary’s pregnancy, however unusual, reveals that motherhood alone always embodies ‘coverture’ at its most literal; the mother of a son, let alone the son of God, inverts the expected operations of coverture in particularly threatening ways …. During pregnancy, Mary, like other mothers, ‘overshadows,’ covers, or subsumes her fetal son.” 12 While Protestants responded to these issues with hostility and alarm, their fears about Mary’s maternal power and agency were shared to a lesser degree and experienced from slightly different angles by Catholics.

Aligning himself staunchly with Protestant thinking on the Virgin’s humanity and disregarding her motherhood in the few mentions he makes of her in his prose, Milton nevertheless presents her as a major figure, occupying a great deal of space precisely because she is a mother, in Paradise Regained. In her recent investigation of the subject, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle finds “Milton’s characterization [of the Virgin] seriously at odds with the scriptural sense restored by authoritative Renaissance philology and sanctioned by magisterial Reformation theology.” Indeed, she argues, recommending sources to back up her claim, “Paradise Regained depends on Catholic interpretations of the gospel.” Boyle’s interesting observation has considerable evidence to substantiate it. 13

The rich, extensive scholarship of Michael Lieb and others makes clear that Milton’s theological positions and the passion with which he assumes them are always critically important for any understanding of his work. 14 As we have seen, Protestants, including Milton, ardently denied the Virgin Mary’s divinity, fearing her rivalry with Christ and moving toward worshipping Christ alone. In Paradise Regained Milton certainly makes no claims for Mary’s divine agency, although he does represent repeatedly and at length her intimacy with the divine and her role as affective mediator between God (or His messengers) and the Son. Most interesting for purposes of this analysis is the way in which Milton deviates in emphasis and tone from the range of Protestant positions he characteristically occupies. Far from fearing and so erasing the Virgin’s powerful, miraculous maternity as competitive with Christ’s divinity, Milton focuses intensely on Mary and her motherhood precisely in order to fulfill his intention to exalt the Son.

Milton’s treatment of the idea that the Virgin Mary redeems the sin of Eve confirms the point. In Paradise Regained Milton presents this issue primarily through Satanic eyes, but his representations are curiously devoid of the misogyny that often accompanies this theme. It is Satan who observes that his fatal wound “Shall be inflicted by the seed of Eve / Upon my head” (1.52-54). “For this ill news I bring,” he continues, “the woman’s seed / Destined to this is late of woman born, / His birth to our just fear gave no small cause” (1.664-66). The fact that the Son is “of woman born,” a reality that fatally contributes to the destruction of so many heroes (e.g., Macbeth, Hamlet, Oedipus, and Coriolanus, to name only a few) is precisely what scares Satan. “His mother then is mortal,” Satan observes, recognizing the guarantee of his doom. Comparing the Son to Job, God reveals his scheme to outwit Satan once again, but this time the triumphant result will be even better: Satan, God gloats,Verse

Verse might have learned Less overweening, since he failed in Job, Whose constant perseverance overcame Whate’er his cruel malice could invent. He now shall know I can produce a man Of female seed, far abler to resist All his solicitations, and at length All his vast force, and drive him back to hell, Winning by conquest what the first man lost By fallacy surprised. (1.147-55)

My point is not simply that Christ’s relation to Mary is the sign and symbol of his humanity, which it is; what I emphasize instead is that Milton locates the origins of the Son’s eventual triumph over Satan in his relationship with his mother.

The Virgin’s role as guarantor of the Son’s origins—and so of his destiny—is evident whenever she appears in Paradise Regained. As noted, the Annunciation is alluded to (always in flashback) five times in the poem: once by God, who recalls it to Gabriel (1.33-40); next by the Virgin, whose account the Son recollects (1.227-58); the Virgin then alludes to it for the third and fourth times, during her lament in Book 2 (67–69 and 107); finally, Satan returns to it in Book 4, declaring that “thy birth at length / Announced by Gabriel with the first I knew” (4.503-04), in order to one-up the Son with his superior knowledge.

But knowledge of the Son’s birth in Paradise Regained is the property of the Virgin. 15 Interestingly, her first account of the Annunciation is longer than God’s account. Milton fills it out with Mary’s detailed rendition of the Son’s Nativity and childhood, adapted for the most part from Luke. It is precisely this account that leads the Son to discover his identity:Verse

Verse This having heard, straight I again revolved The law and prophets, searching what was writ Concerning the Messiah, to our scribes Known partly, and soon found of whom they spake I am. (1.259-63)

As Dayton Haskin has shown, this passage, connecting the Son’s origins with his destiny, constructs the Virgin’s authority as containing but not limited to a very specific kind of knowledge, knowledge of the written law. 16

Milton’s emphasis on the Virgin’s authority in Paradise Regained is indeed theologically quirky and, as noted, seems at first to run counter to his intention to exalt the Son. However, a clearer picture of Milton’s strategies in the brief epic emerges when we consider his focus on Mary’s maternity not solely in theological terms, but in relation to a more inclusive discourse about the early modern family which debated and discussed motherhood, revealing it as a problematic status, as we have seen in the previous chapter. Dolan argues correctly in her analysis of anxieties about the Virgin’s motherhood that “whether or not Mary was viewed as a remarkable exception, the sustained and passionate public debate over her status in seventeenth-century England did not take place in a vacuum, remote from other contests over women’s authority and agency or from historical women.” 17

Debates about the gendered distribution of authority in the early modern family stem perforce from a set of assumptions about sexual equality and/or hierarchy, issues which during the second half of the seventeenth century frequently are considered in relation to sovereignty and the state. During Milton’s lifetime this debate, although falling far short of asserting equality between the sexes, was taking a more liberal turn. Building on decades of Protestant attempts to re-define the family, political and legal philosophers, theologians, and moralists were beginning at least to weigh the possibility of mothers and fathers having equal authority. As Carole Pateman notes, the extreme conservative Robert Filmer, most famous for being the object of Locke’s scorn, comes at “the end of a very long history of traditional patriarchal argument in which the creation of political society has been seen as a masculine act of birth.” 18 Using Pateman’s insights in a recent study of Dryden, Susan Greenfield points out that in the late seventeenth century familial theory was becoming ideologically flexible and could be “shaped to suit various purposes.” 19 Milton himself, weighing and rejecting the possibility of equality between husband and wife, sees husbandly abuse as a potential problem; nevertheless he affirms the God-given stakes of male superiority:

So had the image of God been equally common to them both, it had no doubt been said, in the image of God created he them. But St. Paul ends the controversy, by explaining, that the woman is not primarily and immediately the image of God, but in reference to the man, “The head of the woman,” saith he, 1 Cor. xi. “is the man;” “he the image and glory of God, she the glory of the man;” he not for her, but she for him. Therefore his precept is, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as is fit in the Lord,” Col. iii. 18; “in every thing,” Eph. v. 24. Nevertheless man is not to hold her as a servant, but receives her into a part of that empire, which God proclaims him to, though not equally, yet largely, as his own image and glory: for it is no small glory to him, that a creature so like him should be made subject to him. Not but that particular exceptions may have place, if she exceed her husband in prudence and dexterity, and he contentedly yield: for then a superior and more natural law comes in, that the wiser should govern the less wise, whether male or female. But that which far more easily and obediently follows from this verse is, that, seeing woman was purposely made for man, and he her head, it cannot stand before the breath of this divine utterance, that man the portraiture of God, joining to himself for his intended good and solace an inferior sex, should so become her thrall, whose wilfulness or inability to be a wife frustrates the occasional end of her creation. 20

Apparently more interested in spousal relations, Milton does not mention parenthood in this discussion of marital hierarchy, never directly considering the issue of differential parental authority over a child. At the end of the century John Locke, arguing against patriarchal sovereignty, underscores the “joint dominion” of parents over children, who “must certainly owe most to the mother.” Despite his respect for and defense of maternal authority, however, Locke in the end overrides motherhood in his consideration of women’s familial status. Succumbing to the tenets of male superiority, he asserts that rule “naturally falls to the man’s share,” because man is “abler and stronger.” 21

It is Thomas Hobbes’ account of the gendered distribution of parental power in Leviathan (1651) that is of primary interest for this analysis. As I noted when introducing the idea of plotting motherhood, early modern discussions of maternity assign to mothers a contradictory status: while they have the immense authority of knowledge and origins, that authority remains only indirectly, often obscurely, connected to public cultural forms. In contrast to other thinkers, Hobbes clearly acknowledges that the conceptual inconsistencies in the early modern family as debated and defined have to do not only with the positioning of women in relation to their husbands, but specifically and explicitly with the paradoxes surrounding mothers. In what follows I will examine at some length Hobbes’ discussion of maternal authority and agency, because his logic provides a close and revealing parallel to Milton’s deployment of the Virgin in Paradise Regained.

As Pateman puts it in her study of the sexual contract, “Hobbes differs from the other classical contract theorists in his assumption that there is no natural mastery in the state of nature, not even of men over women; natural individual attributes and capacities are distributed irrespective of sex.” While other theorists insist that “men’s right over women has a natural basis,” in Hobbes “both sexes are pictured as naturally free and equal.” 22 Hobbes is indeed startlingly clear on the subject of equality between the sexes in his discussion of the distribution of authority in the family: “Whereas some have attributed the dominion to the man only, as being of the more excellent sex; they misreckon in it. For there is not always that difference of strength, or prudence between the man and the woman, as that the right can be determined without war.” Hobbes therefore begins his discussion of “the right of dominion by generation” by considering that, logically speaking, parents should have equal rights over their children: “there are always two that are equally parents: the dominion therefore over the child should belong equally to both.” 23

The important slippage in Hobbes’ logic results from these assertions about gender equality. As it turns out, in the natural state, mothers in fact are not equal but superior to fathers. “In the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws,” mothers have dominion over children because “it cannot be known who is the father, unless it be declared by the mother.” Not only does the mother have positive knowledge of the infant’s origins, it is also in her power to preserve or expose the child: “every man is supposed to promise obedience to him in whose power it is to save, or destroy him.” Given the natural fact of maternal superiority, how does it come about that “there be always two that are equally parents” and “the dominion over the child should belong equally to both”?

A partial answer is that Hobbes does not place his faith in nature. He is famously convinced that, if left to its natural devices, humanity would destroy itself. There must be a humanly constructed political and social structure—a contract—that improves upon the given, natural one. Hobbes perceives that paternal dominance is artificial, a fiction that exists because, although “there be always two that are equally parents … no man can obey two masters.” Granting (along with the scriptural injunction) his fearful premise that the natural tendency of humanity is toward the war of all against all, there is still no logical reason why a person cannot “obey two masters.” More important, given his belief in the equality of the sexes, the dangerousness of the natural state would not lead with inevitable logic to the social fact of male dominance. Even postulating the necessity of obeying one master-parent, why should not the parent who must be obeyed be the mother, particularly since Hobbes goes to pains to unveil assumptions about male superiority as erroneous: “they misreckon in it”? My point, then, is not that paternal dominance is artificial rather than natural and so must be rejected: for Hobbes the construction of social fictions is both necessary and desirable. Instead I emphasize that, within the terms of Hobbes’ own logic, paternal dominance is a tautology, circular, an incoherence. Fathers are dominant because they are and always have been dominant. In the struggle for power between parents, “for the most part, but not always, the sentence is in favour of the father; because for the most part commonwealths have been erected by the fathers, not by the mothers of families.” 24

Hobbes wants to clarify and nail down where the power lies. His arguments about the distribution of parental authority repudiate both male superiority and a hypothesized nature–culture divide that would (naturally or artificially) relegate women to a private sphere. He makes clear that the logical slippage, or point of instability, in the construction of the patriarchal family is not the status of women per se, but motherhood, because of the natural and social authority inherent in that position. However, while directly acknowledging and exploring this problem at some length, Hobbes does not solve it. Instead motherhood begins to disappear from his formulations of familial authority. “He that hath the dominion over the child, hath dominion also over the children of the child,” he reflects; and, in his considerations of the traditional analogy between the family and the commonwealth, he observes that the family consists “of a man and his children; or of a man and his servants; or of a man, and his children and servants together.” 25 My point is not that Hobbes erases mothers; they are neither eliminated from nor invisible in his analysis. Rather I am interested in the way in which his discussion of family structure describes with adamant elaboration the immensity of maternal authority and is then unable to develop it conceptually, or to give it cultural form. Maternal authority exists, prominently; but it is undertheorized. It is strikingly formulated, but no account is made either of its enactment or its consequences. It is in fact unaccountable: its components exceed the family system.

In Hobbes’ analysis maternal authority, for all its prominence, does not take historical form; by which I mean that, while it never disappears, it does not unfold in time. This lack of an historical trajectory in time is what gives Hobbes’ discussion of motherhood its relevance to literary representation and, specifically, to plot. As Peter Brooks has demonstrated, plotting is an interpretive activity, concerned not only with “the underlying intentionality of event,” but also with the ways in which “meaning can be construed over and through time.” Plot establishes the relation of events to their origins and endpoints; it embodies “the sense of those meanings that develop only through textual and temporal succession.” 26 Hobbes argues that maternal authority is crucial, but fails to imagine its enactment in time or history. Embodying the authority of origin and knowledge, mothers legitimize the patriarchal family; yet the exercise of maternal authority exceeds the parameters of that same family as defined. In the literary terms corresponding to this logic, maternal authority can be said to exceed the aesthetic dimensions of plot.

As we have seen, Milton’s conception of the Son’s heroism also exceeds the dimensions of plot, in the conventional sense of plot as the enactment and achievement of a destiny. Milton’s focus on the Virgin as the authority figure in the first part of Paradise Regained, therefore, points to his conception of the Son’s heroic identity as bound up in his origins. The exact parameters of the Virgin’s maternal authority and agency are made manifest in her lament in Book 2 (66–105). Here she reveals her uniquely expansive knowledge of the Son’s past and his birth, legitimizing his status as God’s child (“O what avails me now that honour high / To have conceived of God”) and filling in details of his early biography (e.g., the bleak conditions of his nativity; the flight into Egypt). Importantly, she couches her observations in terms of the contrasting public and private dimensions of Christ’s life. Milton emphasizes the Son’s privacy at several points in the poem, from first—he is “obscure, / Unmarked, unknown” (1.24-25)—to last, when “he unobserved / Home to his mother’s house private returned.” (4.638-39). As the final line of the poem indicates, Mary has been the presiding authority over this segment of the Son’s life, which, with her, has been “Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, / Little suspicious to any king” (2.81-82). Despite the framework of privacy that encompasses the Son, the whole point of the Virgin’s lament is her realization that this part of the Son’s life is nearing completion. It is clear that her authority does not extend to his future ministry. She has heard about, rather than witnessed, the baptism: “but now / Full grown to man, acknowledged, as I hear, / By John the Baptist, and in public shown, /Son owned from heaven by his father’s voice” (2.83-86). Recalling the predictions of Simeon, along with her son’s independent journey to the Temple at age 12, the Virgin realizes that, when he publicly undertakes “his father’s business,” she will not be there (2.99). Indeed, as soon as the Son begins his struggle with Satan, his mother disappears from the poem, returning only in the final line, not as an embodied presence but as an allusion.

Considering the extent as well as the limitations of the Virgin’s maternal authority can focus us precisely on Christ’s heroic identity as Milton construes it in Paradise Regained: the Son inhabits human history and time temporarily; he is suspended between the future and the past. When debating why Milton, given the title of his poem, did not choose to dramatize the Passion, several scholars have argued for a typological interpretation that conflates the Son’s resistance to Satan’s temptations in the wilderness with Christ’s harrowing of Hell after his crucifixion. 27 While such a reading may be theologically sound, it does not correspond to the narrative logic of the poem, which exalts the Son as a hero not for what he does, but because of who he is: a son. In the present moment of Paradise Regained Milton insists that Jesus’ public life hasn’t happened yet, a fact that is underscored by the adamant finality of the Son’s private return to his mother’s house.

Notes

  1. 1.

    All citations from Samson Agonistes, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained are taken from John Milton, eds. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and are cited in the text by book and line numbers.

  2. 2.

    These generic designations are Milton’s own. In Orgel and Goldberg, see Samson Agonistes, 671–72; and The Reason of Church Government, 170.

  3. 3.

    See, in Milton Studies XVII, eds. Richard S. Ide and Joseph Wittreich (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) Stuart Curran, “Paradise Regained: Implications of Epic,” 209–24; and John T. Shawcross, “The Genres of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes: The Wisdom of Their Joint Publication,” 225–48; see also Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966); and Elizabeth Marie Pope, Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947). For a recent and very interesting critique of Milton’s typological thinking in relation to gender in Samson Agonistes, see Rachel Trubowitz, “‘I was his nursling once’: nation, lactation, and the Hebraic in Samson Agonistes,” in Catherine Gimelli Martin, ed., Milton and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 167–83.

  4. 4.

    For a different orientation to this subject than my own, see John Guillory, “The father’s house: Samson Agonistes in its historical moment,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the texts and the traditions, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 148–76.

  5. 5.

    Northrop Frye, “The Typology of Paradise Regained,” Modern Philology, 53, (1956), 227–38.

  6. 6.

    See Lewalski, 135 and throughout; and Stanley Fish, “The Temptation to Action in Milton’s Poetry,” ELH 48 (1981), 516–31; and “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained,” in Milton Studies XVII, eds. Ide and Wittreich. Also see Fish’s discussions of these themes and of both poems in How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  7. 7.

    Rachel S. Havrelock, “The Myth of Birthing the Hero: Motherhood in the Hebrew Bible,” in Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 16, no. 2 (2008), 154–78. See also Susan Ackerman, Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 181–207.

  8. 8.

    See Trubowitz for an extended treatment of this topic.

  9. 9.

    Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 103.

  10. 10.

    Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 68.

  11. 11.

    References to the Virgin Mary occur in Of Prelatical Episcopacy, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 10 vols. in 8, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), I, 642. (Subsequent references are cited as CYP in the text followed by volume and page number.) In this tract Milton criticizes Irenaeus for arguing the “heresy” that “the obedience of Mary was the cause of salvation to her self, and all mankind” and for the view that Mary was the corrector and redeemer of Eve; See also: The Judgement of Martin Bucer, where Milton offers various Protestant orthodoxies about “one flesh,” pointing out that Joseph was not the father of Jesus, which is interesting given that Milton erases Joseph from Paradise Regained (CYP 2: 465); Tetrachordon, where he again glosses the biblical marital ideal of “one flesh” in reference to Mary and Joseph, also pointing away from Joseph’s fatherhood (CYP 2:610–11); and Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, where he praises Mary’s “Magnificat” from Luke, the biblical text to which he is most indebted in Paradise Regained, in support of his arguments about Christ’s opposition to tyranny (CYP 3:217).

  12. 12.

    Dolan, 107.

  13. 13.

    Margaret O’Rourke Boyle, “Home to Mother: Regaining Milton’s Paradise,” Modern Philology, 97 (2000), 499–527. Quotations are on 506–07.

  14. 14.

    See, for example, Michael Lieb, The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1989); Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Theological Milton: Deity, Discourse and Heresy in the Miltonic Canon (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), to name only a few of Lieb’s many studies of the multiple ways—both subtle and direct—that theological ideas permeate Milton’s thought and representations.

  15. 15.

    For a very interesting account of the Annunciation to the Virgin in Luke and the scholarly debate about its meaning, see David T. Landry, “Narrative Logic in the Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:26–38),” Journal of Biblical Literature 114 (1995), 65–79.

  16. 16.

    Dayton Haskin, “Milton’s Portrait of Mary as a Bearer of the Word,” in Julia M. Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 169–84.

  17. 17.

    Dolan, 106.

  18. 18.

    Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 3, emphasis hers.

  19. 19.

    Susan C. Greenfield, “Aborting the ‘Mother Plot’: Politics and Generation in Absalom and Achitophel,” ELH (1995), 267–93; 286.

  20. 20.

    CYP 2: 589.

  21. 21.

    John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Thomas I. Cook (New York: Hafner Press, 1947), 43, 162.

  22. 22.

    Pateman, 41, 44.

  23. 23.

    Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 152, emphasis mine.

  24. 24.

    Hobbes, 153, 155.

  25. 25.

    Hobbes, 155.

  26. 26.

    Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 94, 35, 37.

  27. 27.

    See especially Frye, cited above.