The Great Miltonic Meadow: Elizabeth Madox Roberts at Paradise Lost

Abstract

SCHOLARSHIP The Great Miltonic Meadow: Elizabeth Madox Roberts at Paradise Lost________ Gregg Neikirk When Elizabeth Madox Roberts set out to pen her novel about settling Kentucky during the years that America was born as a nation, she likely did NOT have a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost sitting on the desk next to her primary materials, the way that I did when I wrote this opening. Her story about finding a new eden, about making a world out of chaos, is not a backwoods version of the story of Milton's Adam and Eve, and I have no plans to try and convince you that Miss Roberts retooled Milton's epic in her very enjoyable novel The Great Meadow. To do so, I certainly would tell my own student writers, could be perceived as the dreaded literary error that too many writers commit: "The stretch." But I do plan to persuade you that The Great Meadow has echoes and resonance of Milton's epic poem, a classic twelve-book masterpiece that tells a story of Chaos converted into order of various kinds and degrees, of primitive life evolving into civilized societies, of a "fall" from a former state (that turns out to be a very fortunate one in Milton's thinking)—and of the politics and dynamics of gender, especially in terms of marriage between the male and the female. Paradise Lost is a psychological drama too, since its about the strengths and frailties of the human mind and emotions, especially in terms of the differences between men and women, and how each sex reacts to certain stressors or stimuli. Paradise Lost is about loss and redemption, about forgiveness and the need for humanity to learn to live with the knowledge that we are all much less than perfect. The fact that every statement just made about Paradise Lost can be applied to The Great Meadow as well is enough to give any literary critic pause to consider the similarities between the two works. I will return later to the details of the comparisons, but first I must be honest in revealing that although I conducted an extensive-enough search, it yielded little documented evidence to suggest that Elizabeth Madox Roberts was visibly fond of John Milton's works. That fact is perhaps something to give a good literary critic the need to pause again, although not necessarily to abandon the task. 34 Not willing to ignore what I think is a plausible link, however, I found that there is enough collateral evidence to suggest that Miss Roberts would have been required by her college program to visit Milton's Eden in 1919 or 1920. According to several of my scholarly Milton friends, every viable literary program in universities and colleges across the country at that time considered both Milton and Shakespeare necessary staples of the English literature program. There is really no way that a student like Elizabeth Madox Roberts could have received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1921 without having been exposed to Milton in a major way. Whether she admired or respected Milton is of course a different question altogether, but there is really little doubt she would have been required to read Paradise Lost, especially since she was first of all a poet during her academic years. The fact that she earned the Fiske Prize for a group of her poems when she was a student at the University of Chicago lends even more credence to the belief that her mentors would have expected her to know Milton fairly well. If then one accepts the contention that any poet completing a program at the University of Chicago in 1921 would have been exposed to Milton, and further, that even one close reading of Paradise Lost leaves its mark on you—one way or the other, I think it is very reasonable to approach The Great Meadow in terms of a Miltonic reading. You need the element of chaos to start with in order to do that, and both Milton and Miss Roberts see chaos as highly important in these specific works. In Milton, Chaos is not some evil force that works to upset...