Milton's Places of Hope: Spiritual and Political Connections of Hope with Land (review)

The subject of Milton's Places of Hope is the manner in which Milton develops the early modern view of hope as the theological virtue most rooted in place. As a biblical scholar and writer, Milton understood and exploited the Old Testament obsession with "the promised land" as the central source of past, present, and future felicity as well as the New Testament interiorization of that obsession. He employed throughout his poetry the standard emblems of hope — anchor, spade, and plough — and the rich field of conceptual associations that these emblems can generate, to allow his biblical stories to comment on seventeenth-century issues of the ownership and stewardship of land, capitalism, and imperialism. In six chapters, Mary Fenton presents an introduction carefully locating her study within the considerable body of scholarship concerned with Milton and place (including the recently emergent field of Milton and ecology), a lucid discussion of the vexed issue of Milton's view of English colonial domination of Ireland, three chapters on Paradise Lost ranging over a surprising variety of topics, and a persuasive analysis of the "rhetoric of husbandry" (168) underlying the son's mission in Paradise Regained. Introduced rather abruptly amidst the chapters on Paradise Lost, the Irish material is interesting in its own right, suggesting how differently a geography of hope looks for the colonizer and the colonized, but it appears to this reader not fully integrated into the book's larger argument, on which this review will focus.

Fenton complements earlier critics' arguments relating the Satan of Paradise Lost to British foreign policy by relating him to domestic land policy and the demographic displacements of the revolutionary period. She explains Satan's debased version of hope, detached from faith and charity, as a materialistic "motivation to acquire political power by acquiring physical territory" (5) without the burden of service or stewardship. Hope is no less tied to land and place for Adam and Eve, both before and after the fall, but it is inextricably linked to the other virtues and "the ethics of a covenanted relationship" (133) with God that excludes domination and exploitation. On the way to these overarching conclusions, Fenton offers genuinely new readings of a some of the epic's most frequently discussed passages: the Leviathan simile of book one as a self-contradicting representation of acquiring power through land, the prayers of Adam and Eve as models for the edification of the English republic awaiting the millennium, and the infernal deliberations of Satan and Beelzebub as a parodic inversion of the Lord's Prayer.

Rejecting the common notion that Paradise Regained pivots on an epiphanic realization of the Son's divine nature, Fenton argues that the brief epic's plot turns on a shift in its hero's perceptions: with the rejection of the hunger temptation the wilderness takes on edenic features, "locales of hope" (170) that recall both Paradise Lost and its biblical background. Jesus becomes a "dweller, not a wanderer" (175) of the desert. As a dweller who returns "Home to his Mother's house" at the poem's end, he is associated with place and stewardship. In contrast, the wilderness remains for the literally ungrounded Satan a desolate setting that he wishes to possess and exploit, but with no "commitment to belonging" (186) he can find rest and no places of hope. He remains in permanent exile, the condition successively of Royalists under the Interregnum and their opponents after the Restoration.

All students of Milton will find much to engage them in Milton's Places of Hope, as will readers interested in the intersection of biblical ideas and radical politics in the seventeenth century. Throughout the book, I especially admired its author's alertness to Milton's etymologically charged and densely enmeshed language — the interwoven vocabulary of hope (spero) and breath (spiro), for example. Equally admirable...