Judith W. Page

“Milton’s bogey”? Gender, Influence, and Romantic Women Writers

ENL 6246
Fall 2005
Instructor: Dr. Judith Page, Department of English, Turlington 4326 (private office)
Or more likely: Turlington 2410B, ext. 232 (associate chair’s office)
email: jwp@english.ufl.edu
Office hours: most afternoons in 2410B, by appointment is best

In The Madwoman in the Attic, first published in 1979, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar borrowed Virginia Woolf’s idea of “Milton’s bogey” to argue that Milton had a negative influence on women writers. In the more than 25 years since The Madwoman in the Attic appeared, others have argued that the relationship between Milton and women writers is more complicated and nuanced than one of patriarchal oppression and silencing. In this course we will continue revising and refining the notion of Milton’s influence by considering the range of Milton’s legacy—-as epic poet, republican, and defender of liberty—-and by reading a variety of texts by women writers. We will also question established theories of poetic influence and intertextuality, refining our definitions by placing questions of gender in the forefront. In order to do so, we will read a selection from contemporary critical and theoretical texts, as well as canonical male writers

Required Texts

Available from Goerings, 1717 NW 1st Ave:

  • Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Oxford, 2nd. ed. 1997.
  • John Milton, The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford World Classics Paperback, 2003 (or one of the complete editions of Milton’s poetry and prose)
  • Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 1770–1838, Manchester, 1997.
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Broadview (1818 text), 1994.

British Women Romantic Poets Project, UC-Davis. http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); chapters 1, 2, and 7: http://www.bartleby.com/144/

You will also need copies of Wordsworth’s Prelude, Book I, Keats’ Fall of Hyperion, and Byron’s Don Juan, Canto One (all of which are in the Norton Anthology, as well as other major anthologies).

Requirements

Regular class attendance and participation are required in order to remain in good standing. All students are responsible for material covered in class and for any changes made to the syllabus when announced in class. If you have to miss a class, please let me know ahead of time. For each class, please come prepared with at least one significant question relating to the material at hand.

Each student will be required to report on one critical work (defined as either one major article or a portion of a book) for the roundtable discussion on November 3. For your presentation, please include a one-page summary and analysis of the work of criticism to share with the class.

Seminar Paper

You will be required to write a 20-page paper on any aspect of Milton and Romantic women writers that you find fascinating. All students will also present their preliminary research to the seminar as part of a mock conference panel. In addition, you will submit a prospectus (or proposal) two weeks before the mock panels begin. In this prospectus, you should address the issues that you will consider in your paper. Some questions your prospectus should address include: What is the scope of this study? What are the main questions or issues that have drawn you to the topic? What is your working argument? How does your proposed work fit into the ongoing scholarly debate about the subject or related subjects? How do you envision organizing your paper? What problems or challenges do you anticipate?

Grading

Reports and Participation 30%
Seminar paper 70%

Schedule of Readings and Assignments

August 25: The Anxiety of Influence; selections from The Madwoman in the Attic and Feminist Milton
September 1: “Lycidas;” Paradise Lost, Books 1-4
September 8: Paradise Lost, Books 5-8
September 15: Paradise Lost, Books 9-12; Areopagitica
September 22:

Proper ladies and women writers:

Craciun, Adrianna. “Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry.” New Literary History 34 (2004): 699-721.(Available through Project Muse: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/)

Wollstonecraft, Vindication, ch. 1, 2, and 7; http://www.bartleby.com/144/

Hannah More, from Coelebs in Search of a Wife (selections)

Lucy Aiken, Epistles on Women, Epistle I http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/

September 29:

Epic, landscape, sublimity:

Charlotte Smith, The Emigrants; Anna Seward, “Hoyle Lake,” and “Colebrook Dale,” Anna Letitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/
October 6:

Inspiration, genius, and melancholy:

Emma Lyon, Miscellaneous Poems (“Lines to D. F.,” “Ode to Genius,” “An Ode to Solitude,” “An Ode to Sleep,” “Lines to the Muse,” “An Ode to Sympathy,” “Lines to Melancholy”) in http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/

Felicia Hemans, “Corinne at the Capitol” and “Properzia Rossi;” Robinson, “The Progress of Melancholy” in Romantic Women Poets

October 13: Yom Kippur; NO CLASS
October 20:

A. Sonnets:

Milton, sonnet 8 and sonnets 11-19, all sonnets by Smith and Seward in Romantic Women Poets; Wordsworth Calais Sonnets of 1802 (Xerox)

Also read: Robinson, Daniel. "Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim." European Romantic Review 6 (1995) 98-127. LINK

Optional: “Wordsworth’s French Revolution: the Sonnets of 1802,” Chapter 3 of J. W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (California, 1994)

Optional: Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo/sappho/sappho.html
http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/Works/RobiMSapph.htm

B. Forbidden Fruit:

Read Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (available in anthologies)
Here’s a taste:

She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock.
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gathered up one kernel-stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.

----Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market, 126-40 (1862)

Also consider

On women and botany:
With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,
[They] Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,
For puberty in signing florets plant;
Dissect its organ of unhallow’d lust,
And fondly gaze the titillating dust.

----Robert Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (1798)

On women and reading:

Young women who could be endangered by such descriptions [in Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of Plants]. must have a temperament so unfortunately combustible as to render it unsafe to trust them with the writings of our best poets, whenever love is the theme. Paradise Lost present more highly-coloured scenes than any which pass in the floral harems; so does the Song of Solomon, in which the language and images are infinitely more luxurious than the muse of botany ever exhibits.

----Anna Seward, Letters 6:142
October 27:

Prospectus Due

The Prelude, Book I, The Fall of Hyperion, Don Juan, Canto I
November 3: Roundtable discussion of criticism
November 10: Mock conference papers
November 17: Mock conference papers
November 24: Thanksgiving, NO CLASS
December 1: Frankenstein

Seminar papers are due Monday, December 5 at 12 noon at the very latest. I will gladly accept papers before that date.

Additional Materials

Below is a highly selective and sometimes quirky bibliography of materials related to Milton and Romantic women writers. On the various websites I have listed, you will find additional extensive bibliographies that will fill in many of the gaps left in my initial list. I have not included specifics on particular women writers, but, once again, you will find specifics on individual writers on the website. A good descriptive bibliography available as a etext through the library is Michael O’Neill’s Literature of the Romantic Period. For reviews of (mostly) male writers of the period, see The Romantics Reviewed; Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, ed. by Donald H. Reiman (Garland, 1972).

Web Resources:

Anthologies of 18th-and early 19th-century women poets:

  • Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets (1989)
  • Jennifer Breen (ed.), Women Romantic Poets, 1785–1832 (1992; rev. ed., 1994)
  • Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 1770–1838 (1995)
  • Duncan Wu (ed.), Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (1997)
  • Harriet Devine Jump (ed.), Women's Writing of the Romantic Period, 1789-1836: An Anthology. (1997.
  • Paula Feldman (ed.), British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, Johns Hopkins, 2000.

General studies on Romanticism and gender and feminist literary history

  • Behrendt, Stephen C. and Harriet Kramer Linkin. Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. New York: MLA, 1997.
  • Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993.
  • Feldman, Paula R. and Theresa M. Kelley, eds. Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995.
  • Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale, 1979.
  • Mellor, Anne., ed. Romanticism and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1988.
  • Mellor, Anne, Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.
  • Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
  • Robinson, Daniel. "Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim." European Romantic Review 6 (1995) 98-127.
  • Scrivener, Michael. “Following the Muse: Inspiration, Prophecy, and Deference in the poetry of Emma Lyon (1788-1870), Anglo-Jewish Poets.” in The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture, ed. Sheila A. Spector. New York: Palgrave, 2005.105-126.
  • Wilson, Carol Shiner, and Joel Haefner, eds. Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

General critical and biographical sources on Milton:

  • Empson, William. Milton’s God. rev. ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1965.
  • Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1977.
  • Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. New York: Oxford, 2000.
  • Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford, 1942.
  • Schwartz, Regina. Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
  • The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  • The Cambridge Companion to Milton. ed. Dennis Danielson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Books and articles on Milton, gender, politics, and influence

  • Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
  • Aers, David and Bob Hodge, "Rational Burning: Milton on Sex and Marriage," Milton Studies 13, 1979, pp. 3-33.
  • Bell, Ilona. "Milton's Dialogue with Petrarch," Milton Studies 28 (1992): 91-120.
  • Belsey, Catherine. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. New York: Oxford, 1988.
  • Bennett, Joan S. Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
  • Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. (1973). Oxford, 2nd. ed. 1997.
  • Brisman, Leslie. Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs, Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1973.
  • Craciun, Adrianna. “Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry.” New Literary History 34 (2004): 699-721.
  • Ferguson, Margaret, et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
  • Ferry, Anne. "Milton's Creation of Eve," Studies in English Literature, 28 (1988): 113-32.
  • Froula, Christine. "Pechter's Specter: Milton's Bogey Writ Small; or, Why is He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Critical Inquiry 11, 1984, 174-78
  • Froula, Christine. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," Critial Inquiry 10, 1983, 321-346
  • Gilbert, Sandra "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," PMLA 93, 1978, 368-82; rpt. Gilbert and Gubar, The  Madwoman in the Attic, 1979, 187-211.
  • Griffin, Dustin. Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
  • Guillory, John. "From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost," in E. Harvey and K. Maw, eds., Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth Century English Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990.
  • Havens, Raymond. The Influence of Milton on English Poetry, 1922.
  • Kerrigan, William and Gordon Braden, "Milton's Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry," ELH, 53, 1986, 27-51.
  • Lau, Beth, ed. Keats’s Paradise Lost, Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1998.
  • McColley, Diane. Milton's Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
  • Mollenkott, Virginia. "Some Implications of Milton's Androgynous Muse," Bucknell Review, 24 (1978): 27-36.
  • Mueller, Janel. “Milton on Heresy.” Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds. Milton and Heresy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998
  • Mueller, Janel. 'The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in Milton's Sonnets' Critical Inquiry 13 (1987) 475-508.
  • Newlyn, Lucy. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. New York: Oxford, 1993.
  • Newlyn, Lucy. Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception. New York: Oxford, 2000.
  • Nyquist, Mary "Gynesis, Genesis, Exegesis, and the Formation of Milton's Eve," in Marjorie Garber, ed., Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
  • Pechter, Edward. "When Pechter reads Froula Pretending She's Eve Reading   Milton; or, New Feminist is but Old Priest Writ large," Critical Inquiry 11, 1984, 163-70
  • Quilligan, Maureen. Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
  • Radzinowicz, Mary Ann. "Milton and the Tragic Women of Genesis" in Of Poetry and Politics, ed. P.G. Stanwood, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.
  • Schwartz, Regina. “Voyeurism and patriarchy: The Case of Paradise Lost.” Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 85-103.
  • Shawcross, John T. John Milton and Influence: Presence in Literature, History, and Culture. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991.
  • Shullenberger, William. "Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism," Milton Quarterly 20, 1986, 69-85.
  • Siegel, Paul."Milton and the Humanistic Attitude Toward Women," Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1950): 42-53
  • Swan, James "Difference and Silence: John Milton and the Question of Gender" in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed., S. Garner, C. Kahaue, M. Sprengnether, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
  • Walker, Julia M. ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman. Urvana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
  • Webber, Joan. "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost," Milton Studies 14, 1980, 3-24
  • Wittreich, "'Inspir'd With Contradiction': Mapping Gender Discourses in Paradise Lost" in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana T. Benet and Michael Lieb, 1994.
  • Wittreich, "'John, John, I Blush for Thee!': Mapping Gender Discourses in Paradise Lost" in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, ed. L. Claridge and E. Langland. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990.
  • Wittreich, Feminist Milton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
  • Wittreich. Milton and the Line of Vision, Madison: Wisconsin,1975.
  • Wittreich, Joseph Anthony. The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides. Cleveland: Case Western, 1970.