Love Against Substitution: John Milton, Aphra Behn, and the Political Theology of Conjugal Narratives

This article argues that John Milton and Aphra Behn define conjugal love precisely as a rejection of substitutes. Their depictions of love thereby amplify the tension between marriage’s roles in regulating intergenerational substitution and in producing love for a unique object. Both authors use the resulting ambivalence to put affective pressure on political and theological economies relying on the fungibility of persons, including hereditary succession and Christian atonement. Milton and Behn write from starkly opposed political positions at different moments of upheaval in seventeenth-century England. Yet they share a literary definition of conjugal love that can test the political theology of a Christ-like monarch.