Milton’s extraordinarily ambitious intellectual enterprise, with its dominant preoccupation with liberty, is deeply embedded within the context of the conflict which signalled the breakdown of Christian unity: the conflict between Erasmus’free will and Luther’s ‘bondage of the will’. Miltonìs preoccupation and insistente on domestic liberty sets him more on Erasmus’ than Luther’s side. Milton, in fact, identifies libery with virtue and ethical action. In Paradise Lost Adam and Eve keep joining and parting their hands (IV, 488-489; IV, 689-690; IX, 385-6). Throughout the poem this movement dramatizes, the tension between interdependence (liberty for) and autonomy (liberty from) which ties together the couple and which Milton prefigures and creates as a paradigm of the early modern nuclear patriarchal/companionate family as the primary structure necessary to the formation and transformation of both the modern individual subject and the modern state. In an often quoted passage from Popolo Anglicano Defensio Seconda (1650) Milton presents his commitment to private, domestic liberties as a carefully planned program which he justifies on the basis that all liberties – public, social, ecclesiasticaò – depend on inner freedom (‘within’). The poet concentrates on “Domestic and Personal Liberty” primarily in his prose works of the forties (1642-1645), especially in the Divorce Tracts and, later, in the epic. The ‘separation scene’ shares with the Divorce Tracts the theme of freedom in marriage, and the prose essays have often been considered as the context within which the theme of marriage in Paradise Lost should be read. My article argues that – in the two mentioned occasions – Milton’s thoughts move from different perspectives on freedom: while the Divorce Tracts support separation as liberty from bondage, the separation of Adam and Eve before the Falli s paradoxically the premise for that mutual bond which was to be at the basis of the early modern nuclear companionate family.

The 'separation scene' in Paradise Lost and Milton's domestic liberties

PIAZZA, Antonella
2009-01-01

Abstract

Milton’s extraordinarily ambitious intellectual enterprise, with its dominant preoccupation with liberty, is deeply embedded within the context of the conflict which signalled the breakdown of Christian unity: the conflict between Erasmus’free will and Luther’s ‘bondage of the will’. Miltonìs preoccupation and insistente on domestic liberty sets him more on Erasmus’ than Luther’s side. Milton, in fact, identifies libery with virtue and ethical action. In Paradise Lost Adam and Eve keep joining and parting their hands (IV, 488-489; IV, 689-690; IX, 385-6). Throughout the poem this movement dramatizes, the tension between interdependence (liberty for) and autonomy (liberty from) which ties together the couple and which Milton prefigures and creates as a paradigm of the early modern nuclear patriarchal/companionate family as the primary structure necessary to the formation and transformation of both the modern individual subject and the modern state. In an often quoted passage from Popolo Anglicano Defensio Seconda (1650) Milton presents his commitment to private, domestic liberties as a carefully planned program which he justifies on the basis that all liberties – public, social, ecclesiasticaò – depend on inner freedom (‘within’). The poet concentrates on “Domestic and Personal Liberty” primarily in his prose works of the forties (1642-1645), especially in the Divorce Tracts and, later, in the epic. The ‘separation scene’ shares with the Divorce Tracts the theme of freedom in marriage, and the prose essays have often been considered as the context within which the theme of marriage in Paradise Lost should be read. My article argues that – in the two mentioned occasions – Milton’s thoughts move from different perspectives on freedom: while the Divorce Tracts support separation as liberty from bondage, the separation of Adam and Eve before the Falli s paradoxically the premise for that mutual bond which was to be at the basis of the early modern nuclear companionate family.
2009
9788862271509
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11386/2282135
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