DDD
September 10, 2007
“A meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.”
I spent all afternoon yesterday re-immersing myself in Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which is the most famous of the divorce tracts.
It struck me that the key word in this work is “conversation.” Milton’s argument is that canon law–which allows for divorce only in the case of failure to consummate a marriage–must be incomplete, because to take it literally would be to render sex the most significant aspect of marriage. This, Milton says, is un-Christian. (Here Milton yokes together the Old Testament and the New Testament in a pretty interesting way. He also displays some Cartesian hatred of the body.)
Instead, Milton says, marriage should be based on intellectual/spiritual communion between husband and wife. The word he uses for this is “conversation,” as in the above quotation. Far worse than having a spouse who is impotent or adulterous, Milton says, is having a spouse who is “mute” or “unfit for conversation.”
In Milton’s account of marriage, there are two things that you can do only with your spouse: talking and fucking. As far as Milton is concerned, talking is way better.
(It’s interesting, too, that Milton’s remedy for the “irrational heat” of sexual desire is a “frugal diet.” It’s as if he wants all meaningful human functions to take place via the mouth.)
The question, of course, is: What does Milton mean by “conversation” such that you only converse–in the proper, Miltonic sense–with your spouse?
I’ve also been taking a closer look at Lana Cable’s book Carnal Rhetoric, which has a really good chapter on the Doctrine. One prong of her thesis is that Milton works his argument from the top down, such that the argument’s teleology informs each of its subservient terms. (This is different from circular logic–trust me. Or, I should say, trust Lana Cable.) This allows Milton to make words mean whatever he needs them to mean. Most often this occurs in opposite pairs: “Divorce” ends up meaning either “marriage” or “the salvation of marriage.” If, for Milton, sex and conversation are polar opposites, then I would add that “talking” probably means “fucking,” too, or at least it can mean that when Milton deems it necessary.
Am I back to square one yet? I think so.
September 10, 2007 at 4:24 pm
For what it’s worth, “criminal conversation” was the legal terminology for adultery in the eighteenth century (I don’t know if this was true in the seventeenth). In other words, if you wanted to sue someone for having sex with your wife, you accused him of having “criminal conversation” with her.
September 11, 2007 at 6:01 am
It’s interesting that such a high premium is placed on conversation, or as you put it ‘the meaningful functions of the mouth,’ because one of the things I found myself paying especial attention to in Samson Agonistes was this distinct distrust of the mouth, as basically a dissembling organ, and threat to all sorts of human (even divine) enterprises—so you get these choice phrases like ’shameful garrulity’ (l.491) and ‘[Shameful to have] oped the mouths/Of idolists, and atheists’ (ll.452-3) and ‘Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed’ (l.971). As far as marriage is concerned, Samson’s claim that, w/r/t his downfall, he was ‘vanquished by a peal of words,’ (l.235) and that he ‘gave up [his] fort of silence’ (l.236) to Dalila, seems apposite. I think it’s Empson who argues sympathetically and persuasively in Dalila’s favor, and maybe there’s an additional argument to be made for the fact that, at least from a Miltonic vantage, it is Dalila’s wifely right to besiege and dismantle that ‘fort of silence,’ or, better, that any such discussion of ‘wifely right’/'marital privilege’ is always already beside the point since Samson’s maintenance of that fort constitutes a ‘divorce’ (‘a spouse “mute” or “unfit for conversation”‘).
One of my papers for Aaron’s Milton course was on the status of speech and mouths in Samson Agonistes, so if any of the above thoughts seem useful to you, even if only as an index of places where ‘conversation’ happens in the poem, I’d be happy to FWD it to you.
–Bennett
September 29, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I’m actually not surprised that the primary justifications for divorce in the 17th century revolved around sex, and I don’t think it’s necessarily un-Christian. Whenever I think about pre-20th century sex and marriage I’m always reminded of the marraige scene in the Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice (yes, the good one), where the priest outlines the reasons people marry:
1) for the prospect of children
2) as a guard against fornication (you’re supposed to have sex with your spouse because this will make them less likely to use sex in a sinful manner)
3) for mutual happiness
All three of these can be linked to sex, and two of them explicity require it. So sexual impotence/failure to consummate a marriage was a really big deal. Granted, Christian thought back then did sometimes frown upon obsession with the body, but many followed the philosophy “better to wed than burn.” Good conversations would probably be part of an ideal marriage, where each partner helps spiritually uplift the other, but I’m not sure everyone set their sights as high as Milton.