Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (review)

This book is a significant contribution to the much examined and discussed "history of the family" in early modern studies of the past forty years. That in itself is an accomplishment. Influenced by contextualist historians like Peter Laslett, J. G. A. Pocock, Kevin Sharpe, David Norbrook, Nigel Smith (and a host of others), and by new historicism/cultural materialism, Ng is writing both history and literary criticism. The book leans far more heavily toward historiography, but it has valuable things to say about canonical and other literary texts as well. After briefly surveying the book's seven chapters, arranged in two convenient parts, "Revolutionary Debates" (focused primarily on the vagaries of seventeenth-century patriarchalism) and "Restoration Imaginings" (focused primarily on the family and marriage), I will concentrate on Ng's discussion of Milton, especially her account of "family politics" and Eve in Paradise Lost.

In her introduction, Ng traces the history of the family from Lawrence Stone's hugely influential The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977) through the reactions to Stone by Ralph Houlbrooke and others that reassessed claims of patriarchal oppression while emphasizing the importance of affective relations and the neglected but authoritative role of widows in a society of high paternal as well as maternal mortality, where one child in three lost his or her father before reaching adulthood (Margaret Ezell). But Ng (building upon the pioneering work of Gordon Schochet) goes on to assert that the still pervasive assumption of an intrinsically patriarchal and pervasive family-state analogy "needs to be challenged" (5), and she does this ably and from a variety of perspectives throughout the book in her chapters on "Father-kings and Amazon Queens," the pre-Restoration Milton's stress on republican "brotherhood," Hobbes's depiction of the "absent family," and "Cromwellian fatherhood and its discontents." In the second (and perhaps more original) half of the book, she examines how revolutionary legacies fared in the Restoration, with chapters on the Restoration Milton, Margaret Cavendish's fictional representation of marriage and "queenly rule," and a concluding one on "marriage and discipline in early Quakerism." There is also an especially cogent epilogue on Locke's refutation of Filmer and Mary Astell's Reflections upon Marriage that might have made further connections of "the family-state analogy" to eighteenth-century fiction. But this is primarily a book about English "family" politics in the seventeenth century.

In her second chapter, "Milton's band of brothers," Ng uncovers a number of striking examples of Milton's deployment of the "family metaphor," often in transgressive sexual relationships. She might have noted that some of these examples foreshadow motifs in Paradise Lost. In his attack on episcopacy, Milton envisions the government of a Christian community "of such a family where there be no servants, but all sons in obedience, not in servility" (54), a clear anticipation of God's government of the masculine angels in the Heaven of his epic poem as described by Raphael to Adam. In a presentiment of the imagery of the epic's unholy trinity, Milton "fears the Pope, whose tyranny Protestants had shaken off, will again become the despised father of the English by copulating with the Church of England in an illicit affair whose offspring will be the 'Bastards, or the Centaurs of their spirituall fornications'" instead of "obedient sonnes" (55). With respect to the King and Parliament, "'it was a Parlament [sic] that first created Kings, and not onely made Laws before a King was in being, but those Laws especially, wherby he holds his Crown.'" The king is the dependent child and Parliament his parent, and a sign of the tyrant (after the example of Nero and his mother Agrippina) is, for Milton, "'to dream of copulation with his Mother,' [as] the king is all the more tyrannical in asserting that Parliament, 'which is his Mother, can neither conceive or bring forth any autoritative Act [sic] without his Masculine coition.'" Ng aptly...