“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645That man or wife who hates in wedloc, is perpetually unsociable, unpeacefull, or
unduteous, either not being able, or not willing to performe what the maine ends of
mariage demand in helpe and solace... is worse then an infidel.... The blamelesse
person therefore hath as good a plea to sue out his delivery from this bondage, as from
the desertion of an infidel. (691)Yet how such divorce is to be managed remains ambiguous. Milton does not, as
before, place all decisions categorically in the male head of household, but leaves
them to the private consciences of the man and the woman. Though they should
abide by Christ’s caveat against divorce for light causes, they could in practice
divorce for any cause by mutual consent. But Milton does not suggest any mecha-
nism by which a wife, against her husband’s wishes, could act on the rights he now
accords her.
The tract concludes with a historical survey that reviews the status of divorce in
law and theory from early Christian times to the present. Characteristically, Milton
offers this parade of theologians and legal theorists only to satisfy “the weaker sort”
who rely on authority. He claims that these authorities have “tended toward” his
position, but asserts, characteristically, that he is yet “something first” in producing
a full-scale treatment of this topic (693). And again he flatly denies that these au-
thorities have influenced him: “God, I solemnly attest him, withheld from my
knowledge the consenting judgement of these men so late, untill they could not
bee my instructers, but only my unexpected witnesses to partial men” (716).
Milton’s emphasis in Tetrachordon on the fallenness of all human institutions may
be a first step toward forgiving both himself and Mary. Though he expounds the
Genesis creation story as grounding man’s right to divorce securely on “that indeleble
character of priority which God crown’d him with” (589–90), yet the Genesis
terms for what a wife ought to be – “another self, a second self, a very self it self” (600)
- prompt Milton to complicate his view of female nature and gender norms. One
description of a wife seems to relegate her to the domestic sphere: “in the Scrip-
tures, and in the gravest Poets and Philosophers I finde the properties and excellen-
cies of a wife set out only from domestic virtues” (613). Yet, significantly, he does
not call up the usual list of womanly virtues: silence, chastity, obedience and good
housewifery. Instead, responding to the “crabbed opinion” of Augustine that for all
purposes other than procreation God might better have created a male companion
for Adam (597), and perhaps to the quip of the “rank serving man” that Milton
expects a wife to speak Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French and be able to dispute
Canon law, he constructs the image of a joyous, lighthearted, intelligent compan-
ion who will share and give delight to the leisure all men need after arduous labor:
No mortall nature can endure either in the actions of Religion, or study of wisdome,
without somtime slackning the cords of intense thought and labour.... We cannot
therefore alwayes be contemplative, or pragmaticall abroad, but have need of som
delightfull intermissions, wherin the enlarg’d soul may leav off a while her severe