Milton and Divorce

My thesis project was conceived in the following way: I thought “I’m interested in Milton and I’m interested in divorce. Milton was also interested in divorce. This may prove a fruitful avenue of inquiry.” Not inspiring, I know, but there it is.

Milton, of course, wrote multiple prose treatises on the topic of divorce. He was an early supporter of what we might call Divorce-on-Demand (this was just one of a handful of dangerously unpopular causes that Milton aligned himself with). For Milton, every argument was necessarily a theological one–his radical Protestant ideas and cutely idiosyncratic theology informed (or at least in some cases were made to support) his views on divorce.

A (personal) problem: Milton’s prose treatises are incredibly boring to read.

A solution: Many of Milton’s major works (e.g., Paradise Lost, “Samson Agonistes”) deal at least in part with marital relationships. If Dalila refuses to rubber-stamp the deaths of her family and country-people out of loyalty to her husband, shouldn’t Samson be able to dump her and get a new wife? Well, the logical answer for Milton’s 17th-Century contemporaries is “No,” but Milton’s answer might just be “Hell yes!” In this wise, I hope to spend some time squaring the marriages in Milton’s poems with the arguments about marriage in his prose.

A second solution: I hope to involve various other artistic takes on marriage in my discussion of Milton. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is a good example. Also, the so-called screwball comedies of the 1930’s–e.g., Bringing up Baby, The Awful Truth, et cetera (the wonderful Stanley Cavell makes this immense leap of logic possible in the context of my as yet imaginary argument). I’m not interested in comparing and contrasting, but I am interested in echoes and corrections that surface over time in different works of art.

Finally: Without spending too much time fishing for biographical [bass], I think it will be worthwhile to consider the personal stakes that Milton had in the discourse on divorce. I hope to spend some time investigating how this may have influenced the direction that Milton’s radical take on divorce would eventually take. After all, he published his first tract in favor of divorce shortly after his first marriage “exploded.”