"Gums of Glutinous Heat" and the Stream of Consciousness: The Theology of Milton's Maske

Abstract

SOMETIME AROUND 1670 GOTTFRIED WILHELM VON LEIBNIZ puzzled over how one might distinguish dreams from waking experience, jotting down several criteria, among them spontaneous ejection of semen without any contact in sleep; in wakers it is expelled only when they are strongly agitated, but in sleep the spirits are moved internally by a strong imagination alone and without any rubbing of the members.' This seems an unusually material basis for a metaphysical distinction. It might likewise be thought an unusual subject for Christian allegory, although I cannot think how else to classify the episode in the opening canto of Edmund Spenser's Legend of Holiness where Red Crosse dreame[s] of loves and lustfull play, IThat nigh his manly hart did melt away, / Bathed in wanton blis and wicked joy-a dream that precipitates the chain of errors leading Red Crosse from Una to Orgoglio's dungeon.2 To suggest that John Milton's Maske worries the same phenomenon seems, on the face of it, slightly preposterous: its central character is A Lady not a man, and, in any case, she neither sleeps nor dreams. While A Maske is generally considered Milton's most Spenserian production, critical discussion has focused on its relation to the Faerie Queene's second book, the Legend of Temperance.3 Yet as a rewriting of book two, A Maske seems curiously flat. If Comus's lair hearkens back to the Faerie Queene's Bower of Bliss, it has none of the Bower's haunting beauty; the Lady finds his lickerish baits easy to resist, and no near-tragic sense of loss ambiguates his defeat.4 Neither Comus's cordial Julep (M, 672) nor his libertinism make the slightest impression on the Lady. The only thing that happens during the temptation scene is that she mysteriously finds herself stuck to her chair by of glutinous heat (917). The plot hinges on this episode. Here alone the Lady's virtue proves feeble, as do the combined forces of her brothers and the Attendant Spirit; it is at this point that the Spirit invokes Sabrina, whose chaste palms alone have the power to dissolve the gums binding the Lady to her seat. Most critics view Sabrina as figuring divine grace. The precise import of the gums, however, remains perplexing. They seem, as has long been noted, suspiciously sexual, in part because the Second Brother's earlier reference to rape as savage heat (358) activates