Milton and the "intelligible flame": "Sweet converse" in the poetry and prose

2) References to Milton's poetry are from The Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes. References to Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon are from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe, et. al.; other prose is from the above or the Columbia Milton, 21 vols., Frank Allen Patterson, gen. ed..

3) For feminist views on the hierarchical Milton, see, among others: Landy, Gilbert, Gubar, Froula, Nyquist, Ferguson, Interdonato, Belsey, Valbuena, Brittan, Dockray-Miller, and Walker.

4) Critics advancing qualified but generally positive interpretations of Milton's attitude toward women and marriage-but without detailed discussions of "converse"-are: Lewalski, McColley, Woods, Swaim, Sherry, Friedman, J. Demaray, Revard, Patrides, Pecheux, and Halkett. Gallagher, perhaps bending over backwards to achieve balance, is

stirred to polemics when he argues that Milton is not only an egalitarian, but "among the best allies the modem feminist movement can hope to find" (9); and Wittreich presents evidence from their own words that some feminists in the eighteenth century did find an ally in Milton.

Juhnke and Rose analyze a dual approach to women and marriage in Milton's writings, as do Doyle and Turner who emphasize the paradoxical implications of biblical and Church traditions. Turner discerns a divided Milton who is caught, as are many founders of Protestant exegesis, in "contradictory response to Genesis" (6). Turner finds evidence on both sides of the question of female subordination but the preponderance he believes, is for subjection (96). According to Turner, Milton regards sex and "emission in pathological terms" (198). Thus, there is a negative aspect to relations between the sexes with the poet and the reader allied in their guilt and complicity, that is, in their "capacity to share in some proportion the erotic dream of Paradise" (9).

Considering an escape from gender altogether through denial, androgyny, or transcendence are studies by Farwell and Mollenkott. Turner also finds that Milton sometimes blends and blurs functions of male and female, and there are "the seeds of a redemptive and an inspirational revaluation of the 'female' throughout the poetry" (186); and Woods believes that Milton has "an original indifference to matters of gender" which she sees as "informed and complicated by cultural and biblical attitudes toward women" (30); and Belsey desires a condition with no sexual essences, "a possibility God should have considered" (67); and-in the First Century-Feltham, quoted by Hughes in notes to Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: "Questionless, a Woman with a wise soul, is the fittest Companion for Man: otherwise God would have given him a Friend rather than a Wife. A wise Wife comprehends both sexes; she is Woman for her Body, and she is man within; for her soul is like her Husbands" (707). Lehnhof doubts that genital sex actually occurs before the Fall and argues that Milton chooses not to explain "which particular regions do and do not enter into contact with one another in the course of Adam and Eve's conjugal converse." Indubitable evidence of such sexuality would, he suggests, "degrade the prelapsarian integrity of Adam and Eve out of which their very acts of intimacy arise" (80-81). Lehnhof does not recognize as part of that intimacy Milton's and Adam's consistent emphasis on the harmony of mind, spirit, and body before and after the Fall.