“Mortals that would follow me, / Love virtue, she alone is free, / She can teach ye how to climb / Higher than they sphery chime; / Or if virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her.” –John Milton
I have been thinking lately of Milton. Not the Milton scholars associate with the fatalism of the fall from Eden, not the confessional Milton who uses his poems as a space to address his god, but the Milton who wrote Comus. Set in Ludlow Castle, the mosque addresses the rhetorical debate between The Lady and Comus, a monstrous creature who lives in the woods and tries, among other things, to convince young girls to believe in the language of excess. In “The Fruit of Charity: Comus and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market”, Kathleen Vejvoda takes notice, not only of the potential ramifications of Milton's mosque for feminist critiques, but for the ways in which those feminist critiques aid in our understanding of how Milton served as an influence on the young Rossetti. She writes: “(critics claim) that in Goblin Market Rossetti either reinscribes an oppressive Miltonic injunction against female creativity, or that she needs to radically revise Milton in order to celebrate female creativity and spirituality” (555).
Much like in a typical motive, Vejvoda takes on the strategy of indicating a fault in previous scholarship (the dilemma of the “oppressive Miltonic injunction” versus the 'radical revision'). What makes her work stand out from, say, the I’m-going-to-screan-you’re-wrong motive is in the way she plays with expectation: If typical scholarship plays with the parallels between Paradise Lost and the fruit of presence of temptation, sheemphasizes the notion of Milton as a “partriarchal specter and the “complications” of the nineteenth female writer's relationship with Milton (556).
Where many critics draw parallels between Paradise Lost and “Goblin Market” , Vejvoda departs from the expected critical maneuver and uses a lesser known work. This little move, which I title straying (because of the use of the word “stray” in Miltonic discourse) is subtle, but significant: By departing from expectation, the critic is able to keep the reader uncomfortable, just enough to keep us reading: We cannot anticipate what will occur next, but we keep reading, because we want to find out. Of course, it also opens up new possibilities for critical analysis.
