Milton's 'Paradise Lost': Moral Education by Margaret Olofson Thickstun

Abstract

MLR, 104.1, 2009 169 For Isabella Whitney, onepayoff was self-legitimization as apublished authorina society where tobe public,professional, and female was potentially compromising. In A Sweet Nosgay Whitney presents her own labours as a writer and reader as responsestounemployment and economicdeprivation, thereby creating an image of thewriter as solitary and impoverished that recurs in thework of other authors consideredinthis volume.In the writings ofThomas Nashe, forinstance, thefrus trations of theunemployed university graduateare channelledintoan authorial identity predicated on resentment. The gapbetweentheprofessional expectations of theeducatedgentleman and thereality of life onGrub Street producesa sense of exclusionsimilarto Whitney's,butwhich hereprovidesthesatirist with the authority of theoutsider. Outsiderstatusisnotsomething onewould straightforwardly grant Ben Jonson, poet laureate inallbutname.He does,however, frequently represent hisauthorial laboursinterms ofsocially compromising manualwork,evenasheuses thetrope of manualwork todisparage otherssuchas InigoJones. Ellinghausenisnotthefirst to make this point, but shedoesprovideawide-ranging survey ofJonson's use of the ideaofwork,and a sensitive reading ofhis ambivalent treatment of theblacksmith godVulcan. (Indeed,I couldwish shehad examined Nashe'swritingsinsimilar depthinstead ofdigressing intoa study of the Parnassus plays.) One of thestrengths of thisbook is theunusual selection ofwritersonwhich itchooses tofocus:itissalutary, forexample,tobe alertedtotheextenttowhich the'Water Poet' John Taylordrawson Jonson as a 'modelfor non-elite authorship' (p. 93), even as Taylor's stress on his extra-literarywork aswaterman (not tomen tion hisrelatively enthusiastic embrace ofthe marketas a test ofcharacter) contrasts with Jonson's senseofpoetryas a vocationand his uneasyrelationship with the commercial theatre. Again, theideaofvocationlinksJonson withGeorge Wither, and the 'famousWorkes' alluded to in one of theverses inA Collection ofEmblemes (quotedp. 127)mightbringJonson tomind; however, thenotionthat onemight write them 'by composing but each Day a Line' takes us away from Jonson into a distinctively Protestant 'sense of time as a finite set of blocks [. . .] to be used forfulfilling divinepurpose' (p. 127).The chapters on thesethree writersare the most sustained partofEllinghausen's book,perhaps becausetheinfluential figure of Jonson helps her to draw thematerial together.However, thebook as awhole gives a strong sense of the changing ways inwhich authorship was constructed in early modernprintculture, aswell as highlighting theextenttowhich theideaofwork could be used tovalidate as well as to demean. SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY TOM RUTTER Milton's 'Paradise Lost'.Moral Education. ByMARGARET OLOFSONTHICKSTUN. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xiv+184pp. ?40. ISBN978-1-4039 7757-1. For those ofuswho are waryoftheofficial discourse oneducation beingdominated byconcepts suchas skills(transferable oremployability) andknowingthe difference 170 Reviews between an aim and an objective, Margaret Thickstun's book will come as a refresh ing return tohumanist notions ofmoral and personal education. In a way, what she isdoingistaking the basicpremiss ofStanley Fish'sreader-focused approachto Mil ton,and turning itawayfrom beinga solutionto theEmpson-Lewisarguments aboutGod inParadiseLost. Insteaditbecomes amanifestoforattending to the personaldevelopment of thestudents who readParadiseLost aspartof their Eng lishsyllabus. Reading Milton helpsyougrowup. So, thisisa book about teaching Milton,with references tothescholarly literature aboutsocialization aswell as the usualstuff aboutParadiseLostandOfEducation.Itisan interesting, bold,andoften engagingattemptto translate theexperience of teaching Milton intosomething more than adviceonhow toruna successful seminar. Itsopeningchapter, 'Teaching ParadiseLost inthe Twenty-First Century', assertsthatthe poem 'addresses directly theissuesof self-determination andpersonalresponsibility thattheyfaceintheir lives: peerpressure, sexualdesire,thepursuit ofhappiness,thechoiceof life work' (p. 1).Not everyone willwarm to thisapproach, particularly those who think our responsibility is toteachthesubjectand instil academicrigour, andnot toengage explicitly with the psychological and socialdevelopment ofourstudents outsidethe consultation hour.Thebook isold-fashioned, inthesensethatitrevives an ethical discourse, of literature teaching values,that was largely opposedby thetheoretical revolution of the197osand 198os (withexceptions, Iknow).But itisemphatically not reactionary in themanner ofAllan Bloom; and, as one would expect from the author ofFictions of theFeminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation ofWomen (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press,1988), itisparticularly and revealingly alert to matters ofsexualpolitics. There is a theoretical basis to this,but not one thatwould be encountered in the usual anthologies of literary theory, and none of themwill be household names to Miltonists-ThomasLickonaon educatingfor character, for example, orNellNod dings on a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. (The chapter headings arerecognizably those ofa critical bookon the poem aimedoutsidetheimmediate scholarly circleof Miltonists.)Theemphaseson politics,theology, andgenderthat have animated recent discussion give way to a more humanist approach which is implicitly Christianinits deploying ofbiblicaltexts asepigraphs toeachchapter, but more explicitly about literary learning as a way of growing up and living in society. Thekeyemphasis becomesthelearning processinthe poem,notjustofthereaders, or ofAdam...