Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton’s “Comus” as Initiation by William Shullenberger (review)

340 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Lady in the Labyrinth: Milton's "Comus" as Initiation. ByWilliam Shullenberger. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-08386 -4174-3. Pp. 361. $67.50. The first book-length study of Comus in decades arises from a proposition so ingenuous that one wonders how it remained so long unstated. In William Shullenbergers reading, the masque was designed by Milton as a ritual initiation. Rather than just represent, it actually performs its meaning, which is to make Lady Alice Egerton into "something she wasn't before;' no more a lost young girl but "an articulate, temperate, sexually mature and responsible, socially conscientious and engaged, freedom-loving Christian woman" (15). While the final transformation in this list might suggest that the ritual is baptism, Shullenberger makes it clear that the Lady's religious identity is not Milton's concern. Rather, his concern is the self-mastery she needs to confront a rapidly changing, morally and ethically ambiguous, materially distracting early modern world teeming with new kinds of seductions that demand a new kind of human consciousness-specifically, the kind of consciousness into which the Lady is being initiated. The directness of Shullenberger's premise startles critical convention, and not only because initiation rites claim a magical force somewhat out of character for a Protestant reformistlikeMilton. Equallystartlingisthe archetype that Shullenberger chooses to bind his contention, a rite of passage for pubescent girls known to the Bemba people of northern Zambia as chisungu. In this tribal ceremony, social maturation is achieved not through a process of exploration and self-discovery instituted by the girl, but through carefully supervised mystic translation of the girl from the condition of female child to the condition of mature woman. Wise women of the tribe Simultaneously nurture the girl in, and honor her for, the status that their careful ministrations prepare her to assume. Only this process of initiation can turn her into what she must become: an embodiment of adult female agency, fully developed in wisdom, a living vessel of communal hope for perpetuity within the larger cosmos. With chisungu serving as his archetype for ritually attained womanhood, Shullenberger explores ramifications that by multiple circuitous routes link tribal initiation to Milton's masque. Shullenberger's percipience illuminates the seriousness with which his premise requires to be taken. Connections that on first acquaintance might seem dubious are tendered modestly but then subtly and securely reinforced by learned analysis that draws on anthropological, psychological, and literary critique for an interdisciplinary reading alive with the play of myths, images, and characters. This judiciously crafted set of evidentiary relationships centers Comus in a multidimensional framework to invest Milton's Lady with enormous imaginative authority. Her powers implicate the full spectrum of human activity, wherein contours of potential interaction respond to creative BOOK REVIEWS 341 transformation much as does the Lady herself. Bythe end of Lady in the Labyrinth, Milton's heroine has been "translated" from the beleaguered virgin and darling of an arcane seventeenth-century court entertainment to an immanent consciousness beholden to no temporal or artistic boundaries, a consciousness that both defines and enacts enlightened principles of reformist aspiration. A living vessel of Milton's own hope for human liberty, the Lady embodies reasoning moral choice as avatar for an England that in 1634 seemed to Milton poised on the brink of complete political, moral and spiritual self-regeneration. Shullenberger substantiates the grandeur ofthese claimswith closeexamination of ritual components that supply truth-value to the masque through sympathetic magic and symbolic social ordering. But it is Milton's iconoclasm that supplies his argumentative springboard: the underappreciated maneuver by which Milton displaces the magical power of the monarch-until then automatically endorsed by masque tradition-and confers that power on the moral understanding of a mere girl, the Lady who personifies "the chaste conscience of the freshly constituted Puritan self" (47). Shullenberger's inclusive cultural and historical sweep guarantees that this displacement of power is recognized as a function not merely of Puritan ideology, but of something greater: the universal human impetus toward freedom. The displacement of power from divine right monarch to individual subject obviously reflects emergent early modern English subjectivity. But it also...