“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645strictly by the letter of scripture. The fundamental ground for his argument is that
God’s institution of marriage in Eden – “It is not good that man should be alone; I
will make him a help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18) – locates the essence of marriage
in the “apt and cheerfull conversation” of man and woman; God, he insists, did not
mention “the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in
dignity” (144). He also appeals to the Protestant definition of marriage as a cov-
enant between the parties, not a sacrament. From the corollary, that a covenant is
null if its primary end cannot be met, he concludes that, since the evils of solitari-
ness are only intensified if spouses are incompatible, they can and should divorce.
As powerful support for this argument he constructs throughout the tract a sce-
nario of disappointment in marriage, reframing his own story in the language of
reason, myth,^47 and the common experience of Englishmen. An especially reveal-
ing passage about how an inexperienced, chaste young man can easily be deluded in
choosing a wife encodes Milton’s own narrative of his chaste youth, delayed sexual
awakening, courtship under the usual social restraints, misapprehensions reinforced
by cultural assumptions about the proper behavior of virgins, too hasty marriage,
and finally, profound disappointment in the mate’s mind and temperament:
The soberest and best govern’d men are le[a]st practiz’d in these affairs; and who
knows not that the bashfull mutenes of a virgin may oft-times hide all the unlivelines
and naturall sloth which is really unfit for conversation; nor is there that freedom of
accesse granted or presum’d, as may suffice to a perfect discerning till too late: and
where any indisposition is suspected, what more usuall than the perswasion of friends,
that acquaintance, as it encreases, will amend all. And lastly, it is not strange though
many who have spent their youth chastly, are in some things not so quicksighted,
while they hast too eagerly to light the nuptiall torch.... Since they who have liv’d
most loosely by reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successfull in their
matches, because their wild affections unsetling at will, have been as so many divorces
to teach them experience. When as the sober man honouring the appearance of
modestie, and hoping well of every sociall virtue under that veile, may easily chance
to meet, if not with a body impenetrable, yet often with a minde to all other due
conversation inaccessible, and to all the more estimable and superior purposes of mat-
rimony uselesse and almost liveles; and what a solace, what a fit help such a consort
would be through the whole life of a man, is lesse paine to conjecture than to have
experience. (150)Milton is the one who spent his youth “chastly” expecting to find in marriage his
“chiefest earthly comforts” and especially relief from “unkindly solitarines” – that
“rationall burning” which, he insists revealingly, cannot be subdued as the body’s
sexual impulses easily can be by spare diet and hard work (146–53). Complaints
about the loneliness and melancholy of single life, or worse, the loneliness of a life
with an incompatible spouse, sound like a leitmotif through this tract, poignantly
revealing the intensity of Milton’s felt need for a soulmate, a female companion