Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation

Epilogue

Epilogue Before, during, and after Milton’s quadricentennial in 2009, Milton scholars asked why Milton matters. In a brief essay on the topic, Stanley Fish took to task critics who fail to connect their historicist research to genuinely literary questions of form and genre (which, for Fish, largely equate to questions of authorial intention). Fish identifies a desire on the part of many critics to align Milton’s views with their own political convictions as both source and symptom of misguided scholarship. Fish is right that some historicist scholarship loses sight of the fact that Milton’s literary influence outweighs his contributions to political theory or to historiography . Yet Fish provokes excessively by omitting selectively. He begins by adding to the question of why Milton matters the questions “Matter to whom? And matter as what?”1 Fish omits equally essential questions: How has Milton mattered in the past? How has this history set the terms for Milton’s present and future relevance? I conclude this book by briefly turning to the way one writer, Olaudah Equiano, would adapt Milton’s writings for purposes at once literary and Epilogue 153 political. Equiano’s late-eighteenth-century autobiography traces the author ’s journey not only from freedom, enslavement, to liberation, and from paganism to Christianity, but also from illiteracy to authorship. This last trajectory culminates in a 112-line autobiographical and devotional poem by Equiano; the reader is prepared for the appearance of this poem by the frequency of poetical allusions throughout Equiano’s account. In a particularly dramatic and condensed stretch of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano quotes from the first two books of Paradise Lost three times. (After the Bible, Milton’s is the work quoted most frequently.) Equiano places himself and his fellow West Indies slaves in the position of Milton’s devils despairing in Hell. Equiano quotes lines from book 1 to describe his first sight of Montserrat: and soon after I beheld those Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can rarely dwell. Hope never comes That comes to all, but torture without end Still urges. At the sight of this land of bondage, a fresh horror ran through all my frame, and chilled me to the heart.2 It is unclear whether the alterations to the lines from Paradise Lost are deliberate or the result of quoting from memory. Regardless, the change from the original “rest can never dwell” to “rest can rarely dwell” is fitting, suggesting that the abject conditions of slavery in the West Indies are less absolutely hellish than what the devils face. Yet perhaps only slightly so, for Equiano goes on to detail some of the brutal treatment that the slaves endure, and he remarks, Is it surprising that usage like this should drive the poor creatures to despair, and make them seek a refuge in death from those evils which render their lives intolerable—while, With shudd’ring horror pale, and eyes aghast, They view their lamentable lot, and find No rest! This they frequently do.3 154 Dominion Undeserved Here, the alteration from Milton’s past-tense “found” to the present-tense “find” suggests the shift from the mythic world of Milton’s Hell to the urgent , real-world conditions of slavery. Milton’s devils explore Hell and find “a universe of death, which God by curse / Created evil, for evil only good / Where all life dies, death lives” (2.622–24). The slaves in Equiano’s narrative “seek a refuge in death from those evils” and attempt suicide. These first two quotations of Paradise Lost anticipate the third, which is the longest and the most remarkable. In a moment of rhetorical fervor, Equiano declares that the deplorable treatment of slaves in the West Indies can only lead to rebellion. He concludes his ominous plea by quoting Milton: Are you not hourly in dread of an insurrection? Nor would it be surprising : for when —No peace is given To us enslav’d, but custody severe; And stripes and arbitrary punishment Inflicted—What peace can we return? But to our power, hostility and hate; Untam’d reluctance, and revenge, though slow. Yet ever plotting how the conqueror least May reap his conquest, and may least rejoice In doing what we most in suffering feel. But by changing your conduct, and treating your slaves as men, every cause of fear would be banished.4 Equiano seamlessly incorporates Beelzebub’s argument into his own rhetoric ; what Paradise Lost deems “devilish counsel” Equiano...