Reflection: On My Experiences as a Woman Reading John Milton
Throughout my five years of studying literature at the collegiate level, I struggled with what it means to critique a literary work and its author with fairness, compassion, and understanding—especially when an author’s portrayal of the world promotes evils such as (hetero)sexism, racism, ableism, classism, ect. I wrestle with the balance between extending grace and charity to these authors, understanding that individuals are not rightly responsible for the sins of their society, and defending the humanity of the oppressed and marginalized. Systems and ideologies of hate distort the way we view our neighbors. In Romans 12, Paul writes, “Be sincere in your love for others. Hate everything that is evil and hold tight to everything that is good. Love each other as brothers and sisters” (Romans 12:9-10, NIV). It is unacceptable for Christian writers or readers to gloss over these sins of hate that encourage destruction. But we must always love all of our brothers and sisters, even those who commit sins against us. So how do I promote a vision of justice in my work as a reader that is pleasing to God?
In particular, I struggle with how gender has been portrayed throughout most of literary history. It does not escape me that the vast majority of the work that I studied as literature major: have been composed by men, are written from a male perspective, and assume that to be masculine is to be superior. I want to be clear that I believe that men have the right to share their perspective. The male perspective is every bit as valid, useful, and important to me as the female perspective. But I feel uncomfortable and unwelcomed, at times, (not just in the literature major, but in the world of academics in general) because the stories, the perspectives, and the experiences of women are so often misrepresented, twisted, misused, distorted, underrepresented, or omitted from literary texts because men throughout history have consistently failed to display women as fully human, made in the image of God, valuable, and redeemable. John Milton writes Paradise Lost as an heir of a long literary tradition that promotes a dehumanizing vision of the female Other.
I do not blame women who read Paradise Lost (or, unfortunately, countless other literary texts in the Western literary tradition) for feeling frustrated, angry, attacked, saddened, belittled, or discouraged by how women are portrayed in the character of Eve or other archetypal, one-dimensional female characters produced by the male Western literary imagination. These feelings are not unreasonable or unwarranted. There has not been a day of my life, as a literary student, or more generally as a woman, when a vision of femininity that is dehumanizing has not been forced upon me. Justice for the crime of violating our (women’s) humanity is something we women are constantly denied. So, maybe we are defensive about how women are portrayed sometimes? We have to be. We live in a world where women are objectified, romanticized, fetishized, animalized, demonized, and eroticized every moment of every day. And we feel it. I feel it. And it wears on us. It wears on me. So every time that a woman asserts her humanity in the face of this level of dehumanization, we need to celebrate the fact that she has not given in! We need to support a robust, realistic vision of femininity. We cannot afford to “just let it go” or to make excuses. There is simply too much at stake. As Paul writes, “Don’t let evil defeat you, but defeat evil with good” (Romans 12:21, NIV).
This is not to say that we should not read texts that are offensive, hurtful, or destructive. In his memoir Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner writes
…[King] Lear is indeed full of sexist language and the seven members of the Central Anarchists Council are all male—but Chesterton wrote his novel in 1908 and Shakespeare his play about three hundred years earlier, and it seemed to me that if your principles keep you from being able to draw on the wisdom of writers of earlier generations who didn’t happen to share those principles or even to be aware of them, you may be keeping your principles in tact but at the same time do yourself a tragic disservice. (63)
John Milton has insights into the human condition that are valuable and worthy of my attention and respect. I refuse to deny the importance of John Milton’s life and perspective because he, too, is a human being. Flawed, broken, in dire need of a redeemer—human—just like me. I believe that Jesus’ commandment to “love our neighbors as ourselves” applies every bit as much to the authors as well as characters (because characters are an extension of the author’s psyche) that we study as it does to the people we interact with in the flesh, on a daily basis (Mark 12:31). In the analysis of a literary text, we should “do onto others what [we] would have them do to [us]” (Matthew 7:12). If we are going to display the love of Christ in our work as Christian literary students and literary scholars we must never forget that the authors that we work with are human beings who are made in the image of God. All people, even people that we disagree with or are offended by or those who have caused us harm, stand to offer us a perspective toward the world that is different from our own.
Works Cited
Buechner, Frederick. Telling Secrets. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991. 1-106. Print.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print.