Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain

10. The Lost Lady in the World of Comus: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller Read Milton

chapter ten The Lost Lady in the World of Comus Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller Read Milton Jeffrey Steele In the nineteenth century,transatlantic culture moved both east and west.While numerous writers (including Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller) traveled to Europe and recorded their impressions,many more found that their ideas and texts were inextricably linked to European literary models that had crossed the Atlantic to America.As opposed to the immediacy of many writers’ travel narratives,the reception of European texts possessed both a spatial and a temporal expansiveness that linked American authors to a wide range of ideas dating back hundreds of years. When they finally traveled to Europe, these writers frequently made pilgrimages to specific literary locales, illustrating the extent to which their experience had been shaped by the transatlantic circulation of literary models.It is striking that both Sedgwick’s and Fuller’s conceptions of gender and female identity were shaped by their literary encounters with John Milton—an author who helped them understand the nature of moral courage in an embattled world. As we shall see, Fuller’s and Sedgwick’s kindred reception of Milton’s seventeenth-century masque, Comus, helped to solidify the imaginative bonds between these writers,drawing them into a shared network of cultural concerns.In the process,both writers developed stereophonic,bifocal texts that measured social observation against Miltonic categories of spiritual 176 Authorship, Influence, and Reception perfection.Such double vision,Paul Gilroy has argued,is essential to the “politics of transfiguration,”since it weighs the “world as it is”against the vision of what a writer “would like it to be”(3,37,36).This multiplication of geographical frames of reference is one of the primary characteristics of transatlantic writing, whether the travel that it depicts is through physical or imaginary domains. Many nineteenth-century readers—in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s terms—considered Comus to be one of the finest (and most accessible) expressions of Milton’s vision of an existence “purer . . .than any he saw around him.”Measuring everyday life against an allegorical plane of exalted being, Milton’s drama expresses “that philosophy of chastity”that he “declare[d] to be his defence and religion”(Emerson’s Literary Criticism 184–85).A work such as Comus, Emerson reflected in his journal, represents “holy emotions” that “cleanse the foul humours & purify the channels of life” (2: 220–21). What captured the attention of Emerson, as well as other nineteenth-century readers, was the Spenserian confrontation between embattled virtue and what Angus Fletcher characterizes as Milton’s “first great tempter,”Comus (the son of Bacchus and Circe), a figure anticipating Satan in Paradise Lost (163).In Comus a lost Lady,separated from her companions, wanders through a “tangled” wood, only to be accosted by the proto-Satanic Comus and his drunken “crew.” Faced with potentially overwhelming physical and moral danger, the Lady is shielded by her innate virtue–a chastity of spirit—that makes her being literally and morally impregnable . Read as an allegory of the spirit’s precarious journey through a morally dangerous world (in a narrative akin to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), the plot of Comus provided a compelling image of virtue triumphant in the face of temptation . In response to a potentially threatening world of male aggression and violence,Milton’s narrative of the Lady’s triumph offered a compelling model of the ways in which a woman might center her actions on her own independent character and not on the untrustworthy (and often disabling) standards of a male-dominated society. This exalted vision of female virtue based on what Milton’s Lady characterizes as “the freedom of my mind” (line 663) held a special attraction for Margaret Fuller, who used her writing to stabilize models of female empowerment.1 In her eyes, American women, who lacked the defenses of worldly experience and material security, were especially susceptible to the seductive effects of male attention, social excitement, and fashion. As a result, it was especially important for Fuller to provide her readers with images of female being and conduct that might counteract the social pressures they felt around them. One of her primary strategies was to reinforce her model of virtue by multiplying examples of what she termed in Woman in the Nineteenth Century the “idea of woman”—images of powerful female figures, drawn from mythology, his- Lost Lady in the World...