On Authorship, Sexuality, and the Psychology of Privation in Milton's Paradise Lost

Abstract

Certain recent criticism of Renaissance literature has focussed on what Harry Berger, Jr. calls the confusion of literary and erotic motives.3 Given this criticism, we might presume that Milton could and likely did conceive of authorship as having an essential relationship to sexual ideology, desire, even conduct. Further, given the agon of this relationship as it is represented in much Renaissance literature, particularly in devotional poetry, we might anticipate that it would be characterized in Milton's works by tendentious irresolution, ideological instability, and rhetorical extravagance.4 For the most part, however, when sexuality and authorship are mentioned together in Milton studies, sexuality is subordinated, cleanly, to ideologies of authorship.5 Some Milton criticism reverses this structure, and subordinates the figuration of authorship to ideologies of gender and sexuality. These inverse, but coupled, subordinations are particularly pronounced in discussions of Milton's Muse, who is critically viewed as either the emblem and echo of the author who transcends sexuality, and all other earthly matters, or the servant and supplement of the author who models his identity on modes of patriarchal authority.6 In this paper I would like to depart from these traditions and sketch two distinct, but related, representations of the relationship between sexuality and authorship in Paradise Lost. In the first, the divine author is enabled, by his submission to the law and by