Milton and the Grounds of Contention

6. Paradise Enclosed and the Feme Covert

150 Greenberg 150 6 • Paradise Enclosed and the Feme Covert Lynne A. Greenberg We shall see how the stalking pageant goes With borrow’d legs, a heavy load to those That made and bear him: not, as we once thought, The seed of gods, but a weak model wrought By greedy men, that seek to enclose the common, And within private arms impale free woman. — Thomas Carew, “A Rapture” Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture” inextricably weds property and women, private ownership and control, suggesting that men who enclosed land necessarily and naturally enclosed women as well. The poem voices a common paradigm of the seventeenth century, as debates about property rights often associated images of dominion and power in the land with dominion and power over women.1 A range of discourses, poetic, political and religious in nature, envisioned men’s relationships with their wives as comparable to men’s interests Paradise Enclosed and the “Feme Covert” 151 in property. As one proponent of enclosure queried: “Doth not every man covet to have his own alone? Would any man admit of a partaker in his house, his horse, his oxe, or his wife, if he could shun it?”2 Hotly contested during the period, the enclosure movement pitted local customs, equitable practices and commonly held rights against national rules of law and individual proprietorship. The institution of marriage enclosed women within the common law system of coverture; the ramifications of which parallel that of enclosure, literally and figuratively fixing walls or restrictive boundaries around permissible gender roles and additionally limiting women’s ownership of property. Thus, one of the “grounds of contention ” of the period included England’s actual grounds and the extent of individuals’ rights in and to these grounds. The debates over law, land and women would ultimately culminate by the end of the seventeenth century in changes to the division and definition of property and to women’s rights in this property. The metaphor of enclosure, thus, framed and mapped paradigm shifts in parallel proprietary systems of unequal and exclusionary power. Milton’s Paradise Lost in its extended discussions of enclosed spaces and marital relations participates in seventeenth century struggles over both property and gender. This analysis is indebted to Joseph Wittreich’s discussions of the multiple, often conflicting, discourses of gender politics “mapped by” the poem and seeks to respond to his call for a “revaluation of Paradise Lost in its historical moment.”3 Historicizing Milton’s poem has led to progressively more nuanced readings of the poem’s gender politics, as scholars have cautioned that one should consider Paradise Lost in relation to early modern, rather than contemporary, interpretations of Genesis and conceptions of marital and gender relations.4 These historical readings have not focused, however , on the legal constructions underpinning these relations that, arguably, framed societal conceptions. As legal scholars have long argued, law operates as ideology, producing and 152 Greenberg reproducing dominant social constructs.5 Its definitions define, perpetuate and enforce a range of social customs, beliefs, moral values and cultural expectations of a given community and period. Generally understood as representing the dominant hegemony, these legal definitions thus operate in themselves as enclosing devices, structuring and delimiting a particular dominant hegemonic construct at the expense of others.6 By foregrounding the legal constructions enclosed within Paradise Lost, this essay insists that juridical and legal discourse is critical to an understanding of the historical context of the poem, and further, that the poem’s confrontation with and depiction of these conflicting legal discourses possibly gesture to a conclusion suggested by Wittreich that “Paradise Lost, instead of codifying, conflicts with patriarchy.”7 The poem explores the changing visions of property and married women’s rights in a vision of a prelapsarian Eden that embodies seventeenth century legal reforms and, remarkably, anticipates the consequences of this new system. Exploring the legal consequences of Milton’s depiction of Paradise and of paradisal marriage ultimately uncovers the poem’s embedded critiques of the enclosed fields of England and of the married woman’s enclosure by her husband, as both became relegated to private spheres of ownership and control. 1 But suppose you will say, you . . . become one body, and so do use your Common as an inseparable spouse, to be your helper: why are you then so cuckolded by Foreigners and strangers . . . indeed (while you make it...