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  • “To due conversation accessible”:or, The Problem of Courtship in Milton’s Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost
  • Lara Dodds

Milton dismissed the anonymous author of the 1644 Answer to the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as a “Serving-man” and an “illiterate, and arrogant presumer” (Colasterion 726, 24).1 Most modern scholars have agreed that the unknown “Answerer” was not a worthy opponent.2 But though the Answerer does defend conservative orthodoxy and is guilty of ad hominem attacks, his replies to Milton’s arguments nevertheless deserve more attention than they have yet received. With insight and wit, the Answerer articulates practical and ethical objections to Milton’s argument for divorce that remain relevant to critical debates about both the political meaning of these arguments and their significance for Milton’s later poetry. The Answerer’s scurrilous reply reframes Milton’s lofty philosophical and theological arguments in terms that reflect the social, economic, and gender dynamics of early modern marriage practices. Responding to Milton’s claim that wise young men may not be able to gauge the true character of their sweethearts, the Answerer remarks:

It is true, if every man were of your breeding and capacitie, there were some colour for this plea; for we believe you count no woman to due conversation accessible, as to you except she can speak Hebrew, Greek, Latine, & French, and dispute against the Canon law as well as you, or at least be able to hold discourse with you. But other Gentlemen of good qualitie are content with meaner and fewer endowments, as you know well enough.3

In this passage the Answerer draws attention, with far less sympathy than most twenty-first-century scholars, to the submerged autobiographical narrative of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.4 The Answerer poses the very question that Stephen Fallon has identified as central to Milton’s [End Page 42] writing on divorce: “how could a person of virtue and discernment make a catastrophically mistaken marriage choice? How could he now require a remedy suited not to strength but to weakness?”5 The Answerer’s reply attributes this mistake to the husband’s failure to negotiate the social and sexual norms of courtship. Women are “accessible” to conversation, with its connotations of sexual as well as social intercourse, as long as men judge their “endowments” properly. “Gentlemen of good qualitie,” the Answerer implies, know how to get what they want from women. Furthermore, this passage offers a pragmatic, if cynical, response to the rhetorical and exegetical pyrotechnics of Milton’s arguments about the purpose of marriage. Milton maintains that divorce is a charitable remedy when marriage cannot provide spiritual solace and that a “meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage” (246). Modern readers of Milton have sometimes interpreted these arguments as prescient anticipations of an egalitarian model of heterosexual love.6 By contrast, the Answerer’s derisive account of the distance between male suitors and the women they court suggests that Milton’s depiction of the difficulties of finding a woman to “due conversation accessible” is an impractical, and perhaps even hypocritical, elision of the social and cultural consequences of the prevailing gender ideology, in which husbands do not expect their wives to have “breeding and capacitie” equal to their own.

In this essay I argue that the Answerer was right to draw attention to Milton’s account of the wise young man’s failure to negotiate the challenges of courtship. Scholarship of the past two decades has documented the tensions that arise from, on the one hand, Milton’s idiosyncratic personal circumstances, and, on the other, the historical potential of his arguments. Feminist critiques have identified the gendered asymmetry and unpleasant misogyny of Milton’s rhetoric.7 The radical potential of Milton’s ideas, however, has invited scholars to return to his writings on divorce as a site where the seventeenth-century’s fundamental controversies—of liberty, contract, and the rights and responsibilities of the political subject—are negotiated.8 In an important essay, Victoria Kahn argues that the “full story of the subject of contract—the subject of rights—cannot be told without attending to the supplementary role...

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