MILTON'S POETRY AND THE BURDEN OF FEMALE SUFFERING

This study is an attempt to uncover an aspect of Milton's poetry that has been obscured by the vagaries of history: its part in the dramatic spiritual, intellectual, and psychological struggle that so many men and women of his era had to wage in coming to terms with the suffering and death of women in childbirth. The reproductive imagery of the poetry has, of course, been studied in some detail, especially by feminist critics, who have revealed a good deal about Milton's sometimes vexed relationship with sexual and reproductive life, especially as it was embodied in the women he knew and imagined. It is only very recently, however, that literary scholars have paid much attention to the material conditions that Milton would have experienced when it came to childbirth, conditions that over the past twenty years have been explored in some detail by social historians and historians of medicine. Milton was, in fact, deeply concerned with such material conditions. Indeed, during two particularly important periods of his poetic career, his work is marked by a struggle to create a poetic mode capable of offering what he thought of as a theologically and affectively adequate consolation in the face of them. In attempting to do so, Milton was trying to bridge a gap that had opened between literary convention and the highly complex discourses about childbirth that had begun to appear in the medical and religious writings of the era.