Showing papers by "Sandra M. Gilbert published in 1978"

Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey

Abstract: Because the myth of origins that Milton articulates in Paradise Lost summarizes a long misogynistic tradition, literary women from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf have recorded anxieties about his paradigmatic patriarchal poetry. To these readers, the principal story that Milton seems to tell is the story of woman's secondness, her otherness, and how that otherness leads to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from that garden of the gods which is also the garden of poetry. Parallels and doublings implicit in this story, moreover, link Eve, the archetypal woman, with the unholy trinity of Satan, Sin, and Death. For female readers sensitive to such implications, Milton may be what Harold Bloom defines as a “great Inhibitor.” From Wollstonecraft to Woolf, however, women writers have allayed anxieties aroused by this poet, whom Woolf called “the first of the masculinists,” by rereading, misreading, and reinterpreting Paradise Lost.