Abstract
This article considers how seventeenth-century writer John Milton engages in modes of thinking that register the obstetric revolution occurring during the period. During a time when physicians were gaining entry to the birthing room, a medical rhetoric of childbirth was developing that cast childbirth in new pathological terms. Milton's A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle demonstrates how childbirth was influenced by emerging obstetrical language and practice, as well as the ways in which a writer might question such influence. Finally, this article also draws links between disrupted historical rituals of childbirth and modern anxieties about medically-centred birthing practices.
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Endnotes
1 Gwenith Siobhan Cross outlines the new scope of midwifery practice in Britain, comparing it with Ontario midwifery practice (2014).
2 Richard Johanson, Mary Newburn, and Alison Macfarlane discuss increased rates of unnecessary surgical interventions and cultural understandings of childbirth as a disease-like process in need of medical management (2002).
3 Mary Phillips recounted how midwives were “excluded from the Schools of Anatomy,” which forced them to be more reliant on male practitioners for assistance with obstructed births (2007). Additionally, they were forbidden from practicing surgery. For instance, in 1540, a Guild of Surgeons was founded in London, which specified in its statutes that “no carpenter, smith, weaver, or woman [should] practice surgery” (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1990, 99). The early modern hierarchy of medical knowledge also allowed male practitioners to devalue midwives’ experiential knowledge of childbirth, arguing that they were ignorant and unfit to practice obstetrics (Phillips 2007).
4 For example, Sharon Howard elaborates on how this rhetoric shines through in Alice Thornton’s account of her childbirth experiences (2003). Samantha Tamulis also discusses this rhetoric in relation to Puritan obstetrical thinking (2014).
5 David Norbrook comments on “how innovatory Milton was being in giving such a prominent role in a masque to a woman” (2011, 490). Similarly, B.J. Sokol notes that “Milton was both artistically daring and daringly pro-feminist in his portrayal of a persuasively argumentative Lady on the masque stage” (1990, 318).
6 Angus Fletcher emphasizes that textual evidence suggests in the original acting version of A Masque there was less emphasis on the idea of virginity than in the published versions, as the Trinity and Bridgewater manuscripts omit lines 779-806 (1971). Fletcher concludes that by adding these lines Milton “develops the range of his fable and gives it a final framework” (211). Fletcher argues that Milton perceives virginity as a “metaphysical fact” but views chastity as “a way of living” (220, 210). William Schullenberger, on the other hand, has suggested that virginity is the condition of physical intactness, whereas chastity signals an ethical and spiritual disposition (2008). On the other hand, John Diekhoff, holds that virginity is not simply an umbroken hymen, but rather a “divine property” (Diekhoff 1968, 2). Likewise, William Kerrigan outlines how virginity moves the flesh “inside the shelter of sacredness” (Kerrigan 2011, 520).
7 This was common across many spheres, and writers often compared the writing process to childbirth (for example, Sir Phillip Sidney imagines himself giving birth in Astrophil and Stella).
8 A.S.P. Woodhouse argues that “chastity is never, even by implication, viewed in connection with wedded love” (1941, 60). Woodhouse maintains that Milton seperates the physical and spiritual into two different orders, nature and grace, within his masque (1941).
9 For instance, Angus Fletcher writes that while in the masque “virginity assumes chastity, chastity does not require virginity” (1971, 211-12) because virginity is an absolute, while chastity “is the guarantee that temperance will rule the seasons of love and procreative power” (220). Similarly, Schullenberger explains chastity as a kind of sexual temperance, asserting that “married men and women may be chaste although they are no longer virgins,” while “a coquette or coy mistress could be a virgin yet not truly chaste” (2008, 177).
10 Although Schwartz acknowledges that “the reproductive images in [A Masque] represent Milton’s most elaborate attempt to grapple, in verse, with problems related to human reproduction,” he ultimately concludes that “a full study of the meaning of these reproductive images lies outside the scope of [his] book” (2009, 141).
11 Brogan builds upon Sokol’s earlier argument that Milton incorperates “a subliminal theme concerning the menarche” (1990, 318).
12 Brogan ends his analysis by suggesting that Milton may have been acknowledging Alice’s marriageable age when he added an allusion to Cupid and Psyche’s marriage to his epilogue, but does not comment on whether other references to childbirth throughout the masque might also be related.
13 William Schullenberger insists that the masque “initiates a real person into a new stage of her life,” maintaining that “a woman emerges from the performance which she began as a girl” (2008, 15-16).
14 Alice was fifteen-years-old when A Masque was performed in 1634.
15 In the seventeenth century, sex within marriage not only served economic and political functions, but also religious functions. As one author explains, through marriage “a good conscience might be preserved on both parties in bridling the corrupt inclinations of the flesh within the limits of honest” (A Homily on the State of Matrimony 2001, 285). In other words, marriage made sex lawful and virtuous. Additionally, marriage was often considered a remedy for gynaecologic diseases like suffocation of the mother (Brogan 2014, 42).
16 Sexually explicit metaphors discussing “the richness of [women’s] secret treasure-stores, and of the hinges doors, locks and keys to open them” were often used to emphasize the value of a woman’s fertile body (Duval 2013, 235).
17 The older brother alludes to the rape of Medusa when they mention the “snakey-headed Gorgon” (Milton 2011, 447). In Metamorphoses Medusa’s beauty causes Neptune to rape her and Minerva to transform her hair into snakes (Schullenberger 2008, 199).
18 Fitzpatrick and Broadway were brought to trial on June 27, 1631, for their involvement and publically executed on July 16, 1631, at Tyburn (Hunter 1983).
19 For instance, Lady Alice, the Countess of Derby, was “convinced that her daughter and granddaughter also somehow shared the [Earl’s] guilt” and petitioned “to have the King formally pardon them” (Hunter 1983, 29).
20 Brogan also comments on these lines, but argues that these lines stress a “menstrual theme” rather than the reproductive theme illuminated here (Brogan 2014).
21 Critic Beth Bradburn argues that here Milton plays with the conceptual metaphor “the mind is a womb” (2004, 459). This was a popular poetic metaphor employed by writers such as William Shakespeare and Sir Phillip Sidney, discussed in more depth by Katherine Eisaman Maus and Elizabeth Sacks.
22 For instance, physician John Sadler writes:
The imaginative power at the time of conception is of such force that it stamps the character of the thing imagined upon the child: so that the children of an adultresse may be like unto her own husband as though begotten by another man; which is caused through the force of the imagination which the woman hath of her owne husband in the act of coition. (1636, 139)
23 Sadler describes a condition called “the weeping of the womb,” which hinders successful reproduction and arises when the blood is “in an evill [sic] quality” and becomes “grosse and thick that it cannot flow forth as it ought to doe, but by drops” (1636, 45-46). Similarly, surgeon Jakob Rüff connects “evill [sic] chances” or “immoderate desire [or] lust” to the perversion of the reproductive process, documenting how “the seeds of men and women” might become “congealed and clotted together” and result in a “deformed and misshapen birth” (1634, 154-55).
24 Several medical texts in the period echo this religious language and advise women to accept God’s punishment and appeal to God’s mercy. Christopher Hooke, for instance, tells women to remember that “the multiplying of [their] pains in conception and bringing forth” is the result “of the curse of God” (1995, 123). However, women also took up the language of suffering as a form of redemption, glorifying maternal pains as a form of spiritual trial (McPherson 2007). For example, Howard recounts how Alice Thornton uses “discourses of martyrdom” to describe childbirth and motherhood (2003, 377).
25 Schwartz elaborates that women “saw themselves as belonging to a virtuous social class, and simply expected their births to be [difficult]” (2009, 34).
26 Audrey Eccles estimates that twenty-five in every thousand mothers died in early modern England (Schwartz 2009).
27 Duval says, “women feel their children quicken” (2013, 258).
28 Rüff praises birth-stools in his medical text, advising midwives to “bring the labouring woman to her stoole” (1634, 79-80).
29 As Brogan points out, Milton’s reference to “venomed” may echo medical descriptions of “the ‘venomous matter’ that flowed from the womb when the midwife’s cure [for retained menses] had done its work” (2014, 28). This observation further supports a reading of Sabrina as a midwife-figure.
30 Brogan recounts how this line appeared in the revised epilogue, and possibly registers Alice’s marriageable age at the time (2014).
31 For instance, Sara Moore comments on how modern obstetrical medicine may exclude women of lower socioeconomic classes with a less developed understanding of medical terminology, causing them “to have negative feelings toward their pregnancies” and to “exhibit less interest in the birth process” (2011, 382). Claudia Malacrida and Tiffany Boulton also address issues with the medicalization of obstetrics, outlining feminist arguments “that medical dominance over all aspects of pregnancy and birth has served to undercut women’s control and autonomy over their bodies and the birthing process” (2014, 44). Malacrida and Boulton go on to interview Canadian women about their delivery experiences, drawing out common themes about cascades of medical interventions and “guilt and inadequacy that many of the women felt when they did not have the birth they expected” 54).
32 Take, for example, Brogan’s critique of Milton’s exploration of gynecologic diseases (2014).
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Frayne, A. From Girlhood to Motherhood: Rituals of Childbirth and Obstetrical Medicine Re-Examined through John Milton. J Med Humanit 41, 179–192 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9497-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9497-6