Lady in the labyrinth: Milton's Comus as initiation

Abstract

This book studies Milton's Ludlow Maske of 1634 as a rite of passage. Maske fashions and mobilizes its Lady as an independent subject and moral agent, the inviolably private, conscience-governed self of English Puritan culture. Initiating a ritual discourse on virtue that is not founded in and dependent on royalist ideology, Milton feminizes both the discourse on heroic virtue and the mythologized cosmos that supports it, and authenticates female prophetic speech and ethical action in a way that prepares for women's participation in the emerging public sphere and in the reformation of literary histories.The first of Milton's heroes of Christian Liberty, the Lady is also the first of his characters to participate in the seventeenth-century's literary invention and development of the early modern subject. The exemplary social importance of the Lady thus makes Comus a startling founding gesture of early modern feminism. William Shullenberger is Professor of Literature and Joseph Campbell Chair in the Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College.