Virginia Woolf on Reading Paradise Lost

I was rereading James Turner’s essay “The Aesthetics of Divorce” (which I think will be useful if only because–in the parlance of the thesis class–it stands as an emblematic example of a specific critical folly regarding the divorce tracts), and I was struck by this quotation from Virginia Woolf that Turner starts the essay off with:

“I get no help in judging life; I scarcely feel that Milton lived or knew men and women; except for the peevish personalities about marriage and the woman’s duties”

I guess I’d just sort of ignored this before–Turner is not an elegant or subtle writer, so his arguments tend to have these obvious pushing off points that can usually just be skipped over. But I like the part about doubting whether Milton lived or knew people. I’m not sure what to make of her reading of PL–it strikes me as obviously wrong, but it’s certainly the case that the powerful rhetoric of DDD makes a more conspicuously personal impression on the reader, and I wonder whether I’m having trouble separating my readings of those two texts.

Dalila’s Something or Other

John Guillory’s essays “Dalila’s House” and “The Father’s House” are both really excellent. He provides, e.g., the history illiterate (in this case, myself) with great sources on the conventions of marriage labor practices in 16th- and 17th-century England–quoting Roberta Hamilton, he notes that the age is characterized by “the separation of production from consumption, work from home, housework from work, and public from private.”

For Guillory, these are historical conditions. That’s cool, but I’m interested in Guillory’s idea of the sexual division of labor as a possible explanation for the Stanley Cavell quotation regarding marriage’s always being a divorce (see “Pursuits” above); I think Cavell is saying something important forMilton–on the one hand, marriage serves an ideal and divorce is iconoclastic/destructive; but, on the other hand, there’s a sense in Milton in which these actions are also simultaneously reversed so that marriage is destructive or entails a “rupture,” whereas divorce means something prior, something more whole, more natural, or at the very least more comfortable. (I’m still trying to figure out a way in which I can not argue in favor of the critical platitude that Milton is a “creative iconoclast.”)

If Cavell has Milton right–and, while I’m not entirely convinced that he does, he is pretty persuasive–then marriage is about happiness, and divorce is a proper remedy to marital unhappiness. But this loses sight of Milton’s politico-theologico-aesthetic concerns. Which is dangerous, I think, because, for Milton, these categories are not just analogous but in fact are coextensive.