Unmolding Reason's Mintage
Last semester I enrolled in ENGL 196: American Literary Traditions. I admit to a bit of grumbling in signing up for that course--it's a survey course, and no one seemed particularly interested in reading anthologies filled with, I don't know, Emily Dickinson with her weird line breaks or Faulkner with his distinctly American depression. Besides, as I was attempting to professionalize myself for an eventual specialization in British literature, I thought America was...well, really a waste of time (other than, of course, the uber-cool New World/colonial references in Paradise Lost).
That course not only challenged and deepened how I understood certain historical and cultural distinctions dividing elements of Bristish literature from American--and British identity from American--but it completely changed the trajectory of my academic interests. For it was in that course that I developed a love of what could be called the "horrible woods"--the forest as a place of sin, confusion, miscegenation, and unnameable terror. The horrible woods is a recurrent topic in American lit., often covertly influential if not always immediately recognizable. Even during the Transcendentalist movement, though the woods were not usually still conceptualized as evil or threatening (to my knowledge), they still retained a definite transformative power. It is this interest in the monstrous woods that I wish to explore in Comus.
Beginning Milton's work is a angelic being in the process of descending into this constricting sty known as earth. At the end of the work the spirit will ascend into Heaven, creating not only a lovely "book-end" effect, but leaving a kind of map behind to readers, a map created through his narrativization of each step (and feeling) from earth to Heaven. Virtue, the spirit proclaims, is our vessel of transport, the bridge between and guide through different worlds--she is also the only hope anyone has of escaping the woods. We are told that "the perplex't paths of this drear wood, / The nodding horror of whose shady brows / Threats the forlorn and the wand'ring Passenger" (91), and as we learn in the progression of Comus, we are all alien, wandering travellers in the foreign worlds/woods. Here is where the acute awareness of audience--of the readers/recipients of the tale both internal and external to the text--possessed by Comus should be stressed.
This awareness is heightened with direct addresses to audience: "Listen," the spirit beseeches, "for I will tell ye now / What never yet was heard in Tale or Song / From old or modern Bard, in Hall or Bow'r" (91). As discussed in class, Milton was fascinated by binary pairs, particularly that of light and dark, sight and blindness. This passage reflects that interest, for we are made aware of receiving a tale only "now" being brought to light, a story of the hidden and the solemn occurring in a dark labyrinth of trees. We are being made aware; awakened; warned of the true histories of dismissed myths: "I'll tell ye; 'tis not vain or fabulous, / (Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance) / What the sage Poets taught by th' heav'nly Muse / Storied of old in high immortal verse [...]" (102). "Unbelief," the spirit proclaims, "is blind."
The light of day and the dark of night are not only seen as oppositional, but they actively police each other, or rather, the night muffles what the sun shouts. It is here that Comus offers a fascinating definition of evil: "'Tis only daylight that makes Sin," he announces, radically challenging any firm, fixed understandings of good and evil. Sin, for Comus, is only that which is seen (in multiple senses of the word) as sin, witnessed and documented and confessed to as sin, and "these dun shades will ne'er report" (93). The testament of nature or the "witness" of nature to the validity or unnaturalness of human actions (a theme only touched on in previous posts) is severely disturbed in this work: for here, nature is not a coherent whole, operating as a complete sentience, but is divided and working against segements of itself for the varied desires of its inhabitants. In this division, it seems clear that forests are places of chaos, gluttony, sexuality, and monstrosity--the paradox of natural unnaturalness, or unnatural naturalness. Whether these acts and ways of being are evil remains a question of perspective (though I think it's safe to assume that Comus is made, at the very least, uncomfortable by them).
I feel a quick note should be added here about the body/mind dualism so present in Comus: the concept of knowledge or words as food to be digested by the spirit or the mind's "stomach" is, of course, a major trope (the best example of this would probably be the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) that tends to complicate the line constructed between mind and body as it simultaneously reifies it. That said, I wish to highlight the scene containing philosophy's "perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, / Where no crude surfeit reigns" (101). It is such a startling image of bountiful austerity that perfectly embodies the complicated, (unnaturally?) mixed nature of Comus.
That course not only challenged and deepened how I understood certain historical and cultural distinctions dividing elements of Bristish literature from American--and British identity from American--but it completely changed the trajectory of my academic interests. For it was in that course that I developed a love of what could be called the "horrible woods"--the forest as a place of sin, confusion, miscegenation, and unnameable terror. The horrible woods is a recurrent topic in American lit., often covertly influential if not always immediately recognizable. Even during the Transcendentalist movement, though the woods were not usually still conceptualized as evil or threatening (to my knowledge), they still retained a definite transformative power. It is this interest in the monstrous woods that I wish to explore in Comus.
Beginning Milton's work is a angelic being in the process of descending into this constricting sty known as earth. At the end of the work the spirit will ascend into Heaven, creating not only a lovely "book-end" effect, but leaving a kind of map behind to readers, a map created through his narrativization of each step (and feeling) from earth to Heaven. Virtue, the spirit proclaims, is our vessel of transport, the bridge between and guide through different worlds--she is also the only hope anyone has of escaping the woods. We are told that "the perplex't paths of this drear wood, / The nodding horror of whose shady brows / Threats the forlorn and the wand'ring Passenger" (91), and as we learn in the progression of Comus, we are all alien, wandering travellers in the foreign worlds/woods. Here is where the acute awareness of audience--of the readers/recipients of the tale both internal and external to the text--possessed by Comus should be stressed.
This awareness is heightened with direct addresses to audience: "Listen," the spirit beseeches, "for I will tell ye now / What never yet was heard in Tale or Song / From old or modern Bard, in Hall or Bow'r" (91). As discussed in class, Milton was fascinated by binary pairs, particularly that of light and dark, sight and blindness. This passage reflects that interest, for we are made aware of receiving a tale only "now" being brought to light, a story of the hidden and the solemn occurring in a dark labyrinth of trees. We are being made aware; awakened; warned of the true histories of dismissed myths: "I'll tell ye; 'tis not vain or fabulous, / (Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance) / What the sage Poets taught by th' heav'nly Muse / Storied of old in high immortal verse [...]" (102). "Unbelief," the spirit proclaims, "is blind."
The light of day and the dark of night are not only seen as oppositional, but they actively police each other, or rather, the night muffles what the sun shouts. It is here that Comus offers a fascinating definition of evil: "'Tis only daylight that makes Sin," he announces, radically challenging any firm, fixed understandings of good and evil. Sin, for Comus, is only that which is seen (in multiple senses of the word) as sin, witnessed and documented and confessed to as sin, and "these dun shades will ne'er report" (93). The testament of nature or the "witness" of nature to the validity or unnaturalness of human actions (a theme only touched on in previous posts) is severely disturbed in this work: for here, nature is not a coherent whole, operating as a complete sentience, but is divided and working against segements of itself for the varied desires of its inhabitants. In this division, it seems clear that forests are places of chaos, gluttony, sexuality, and monstrosity--the paradox of natural unnaturalness, or unnatural naturalness. Whether these acts and ways of being are evil remains a question of perspective (though I think it's safe to assume that Comus is made, at the very least, uncomfortable by them).
I feel a quick note should be added here about the body/mind dualism so present in Comus: the concept of knowledge or words as food to be digested by the spirit or the mind's "stomach" is, of course, a major trope (the best example of this would probably be the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) that tends to complicate the line constructed between mind and body as it simultaneously reifies it. That said, I wish to highlight the scene containing philosophy's "perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, / Where no crude surfeit reigns" (101). It is such a startling image of bountiful austerity that perfectly embodies the complicated, (unnaturally?) mixed nature of Comus.
posted by alh at 10:44 PM
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