“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645who would, in some ways at least, take Diodati’s place. His idealistic expectations
are evident in his descriptions of the desired soulmate and companion: “a fit con-
versing soul,” “an intimate and speaking help” against all the sorrows and casualties
of life, “a ready and reviving associate,” the “copartner of a sweet and gladsome
society” (151–3), who is lively, intelligent, and eager to share his ideas and interests.
With such hopes dashed, a disappointed man of melancholy temperament – a schol-
arly penseroso like Milton – is condemned, the tract asserts, to a wedded loneliness
threatening health, faith, and even life itself (149). He suffers “a daily trouble and
paine of losse in some degree like that which Reprobates feel” (148); he may “mutin
against divine providence” and give way to that “melancholy despair which we see
in many wedded persons” (153), and so be disabled for public or private employ-
ment (161). Milton did not give way to despair, or give over teaching and writing,
but he could not, it seems, write much poetry.
Milton allows that such unhappiness may afflict either party (260), but his sce-
nario takes the form of a parodic romance in which the earthbound, unfit wife
threatens to subvert the male protagonist’s spiritual quest and search for transcend-
ence.^48 This scenario finds biblical warrant in Paul’s advice to leave a seducing
idolatress (155–8) – and Milton probably intends some allusion to the “seducing
idolatress” on the throne, the Roman Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria.^49
Milton castigates as carnal and brutish those who support the present divorce
laws, which take account only of physical conditions: impotence, frigidity, consan-
guinity, adultery, desertion. Married persons who are found “suitably weapon’d to
the least possibilitie of sensuall enjoyment” are made “spight of antipathy to fadge
together” (144), though “instead of beeing one flesh, they will be rather two carkasses
chain’d unnaturally together; or as it may happ’n, a living soule bound to a dead
corps” (177). Paul’s dictum, “It is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9)
refers, Milton insists, vehemently if implausibly, to that longing for companionship
which Adam felt even in Eden; it cannot be “the meer motion of carnall lust, not
the meer goad of a sensitive desire; God does not principally take care for such
cattell” (151). This language goads the reader to repudiate such baseness and to
identify rather with gentle and generous persons like Milton, who recognize that
mental and social deficiencies are far more serious grounds for divorce than are the
accepted physical defects.
At length Milton has to confront directly the biblical text (Matthew 19:3–9) in
which Christ seems to prohibit divorce except for adultery, and to rescind the
Mosaic law (Deuteronomy 24:1–2) allowing divorce if a man finds “some unclean-
ness” in his wife:
The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, is it lawful for
a man to put away his wife for every cause?
And he answered and said unto them. Have ye not read, that he which made them
at the beginning made them male and female.