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.