Girl, Interrupted: Spenserian Bondage and Release in Milton's Ludlow Mask

Abstract

The Lady's stasis in Comus's chair is one of the great riddles of Milton's Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. 1 The Mask stages a rite of passage for its Lady from childhood into womanhood. Her fixture in the chair, subject to Comus's temptation and threat, makes sense as an element typical of rituals of initiation. 2 In constructing his plot, Milton decides to deprive the Lady's brothers of the triumphant release of their sister, and of a decisive triumph over Comus. This puzzle of an incomplete rescue mission is dramatically and thematically consonant with the puzzle of the Lady's paralysis. Milton's psychological tact and comprehension of the logic of female initiation is flawless here: representatives of virtuous male chastity, the brothers are able to drive off the libertine Comus, but the Lady needs a woman's touch to release her from her bondage and complete her initiation. The abortive rescue operation thus divides the structure of the Mask's dramatic center into two parts. These two parts represent two phases of the Lady's initiatory ordeal, and each phase has its presiding supernatural figure. 3 Comus, who plays the role assigned the figure of the "mock bridegroom" in some traditional rites of passage, presides over the first phase of her trial. In rites of passage like the chisungu practiced by the Bemba people of Zambia, the mock bridegroom's role involves sexual teasing and threats to the initiate (Richards 122). These actions provide adversarial instruction to the girl in the dangers of male sexual potency and in the management of her proper response to it. Sabrina, invoked by the Attendant Spirit, presides over the second part of the Lady's trial as a tutelary godmother, to mediate the generative mysteries of womanhood to the Lady, and to mobilize her for the social exercise of those mysteries. A river goddess of flow and fertility, Sabrina exemplifies a once-threatened yet inviolable virginity like the Lady's, transformed into generous and healing maternal power. The Attendant Spirit, as the master of ceremonies, orchestrates the transition between the two parts of the Lady's trial and provides the framing security of providentially informed choral commentary.The two parts of the Lady's trial resolve the seeming differences between the Lady's signature virtue, chastity, and the theological virtue of charity. 4 The first part, the debate between Comus and the Lady (659-813), provides occasion for the Lady to reflect on and articulate the productive interinanimations of chastity and virginity as a composite condition of true and vigorous virtue . In the second part, Sabrina releases the Lady from her fixity (814-921), and enlarges the domain of virtue's exercise by disclosing the intricate mutual identification between chastity and charity. The Lady's virtue thus first constellates itself under the pressure of Comus as a defensive self-centering structure. In the second part of the Mask's temptation sequence, Sabrina mobilizes the Lady's 184 MILTON QUARTERLY

Milton, Jerome, and Apocalyptic Virginity

“…See, for example, Sirluck,Rogers, The idea that the poem celebrates marriage is widespread, though some critics see this as a gain (because it signals that the Lady and/or Milton have matured past their virginity fixation) and others as a loss (virginity allows the Lady a kind of self-determination that marriage will not). See Kerrigan, 51-61;Halpern;Kim;Shullenberger, 2001;Orgel, 42-44. 58 Eustochium and Jovinian were written nearly a decade apart, the former in 384 CE and the latter in 393 CE.…”

“…Early readings of the poem as a Christian allegory tended to argue that she represented divine grace, while more recent readings have been interested in the possibility of female sympathy between the two characters. It is puzzlingly common, however, for critics to ignore or downplay the importance of Sabrina's virginity, even calling her role “maternal” (Shullenberger, 2003, 184, 194), “motherly” (Kendrick, 51), akin to that of a “midwife” (Brogan, 38), or otherwise seeing her as guiding the Lady from immature virginity to wedded chastity. See also Kim; Lewalski, 2005, 80–81.…”

“Perplex't Paths”: Youth and Authority in Milton'sMask*

“… 105 For a Lacanian account of this process, see Shullenberger, 2003a, 190–91: “The child enters the symbolic order through the mastery of language, which gives her both greater and lesser control of her world. Language mastery makes the will articulate, expansive, and specific — but at the same time makes the will's claims more modest.” …”

“…40 Milton, 1998, 125 (Mask, 40). See Shullenberger, 2001, 34, for a description of the wood as a ''liminal zone'' created to test liminal characters. Shullenberger's psychosexual reading is generative, although his idea of the wood's ''overdetermined'' symbolic role in the Lady's ''initiatory rite'' into adulthood seems to me to underestimate the ambiguity of this transformation in the period.…”

“…107 For accounts of A Mask as a clash between diametrically opposed worldviews, seeFish, 157; Cox, 627; Swan, 405. 108Shullenberger, 2003b, 422. 109 Milton, 1998.…”