“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674otypes of the feminine. She takes great care about her appearance, sailing in like a
ship “bedeckt, ornate, and gay” with perfume and damsel train (712–21) to visit the
blind Samson; she weeps delicately, “like a fair flower surcharg’d with dew (728);
and she excuses her treachery to Samson by supposed female traits: women’s curios-
ity to know and tell secrets, woman’s frailty, and domestic love which seeks to keep
her husband safe at home. This portrait of Dalila gives some recognition to the cul-
tural pressures on women in a patriarchal society, but Milton will not excuse woman
or man on grounds of gender stereotypes or cultural constraints from the responsibil-
ity of developing and following a personal conscience. This harsh standard is egalitar-
ian in insisting that women as well as men can and must act as free moral agents:
Samson refuses the claims of female weakness, holding Dalila and himself to the same
moral standard – “All wickedness is weakness” (834). And he evidently measures her
claims of repentance, conjugal affection, and desire to make amends against his own
painful struggles for self-knowledge and true repentance. The reader can also make
this comparison and recognize some contrasts. Unlike Manoa and the chorus, Dalila
says nothing at all about Samson’s pitiful condition and poses no metaphysical ques-
tions to the universe. And, unlike Eve, she engages in a constant rhetoric of self-
exculpation and shifting excuses. In Paradise Lost Milton portrays a marriage knit back
together as Adam reconciles with a truly repentant wife. Here he portrays a moral
chasm that necessitates divorce: “Thou and I long since are twain” (929).
Dalila’s final excuse is an appeal to the authority of state and church: the Philistine
magistrates and priests urged her to betray her husband as a civic and religious duty,
reinforcing it with authoritative maxims “that to the public good / Private respects
must yield” (867–8). This excuse might suggest that there is little to choose between
Dalila’s motives and Samson’s, since he intended his marriage to advance Israel’s cause
against the Philistines. But Samson denies this implied cultural relativism, declaring
that if she had loved him as he loved her she could not have betrayed him (he did not
harm her by his actions against Philistia), and that the ungodly deeds of her gods prove
that they are no gods. He also denies final authority to civil and religious leaders or to
raison d’état, appealing to the higher law of nature and nations which privileges the
marriage bond above the claims of the state. The issue of cultural relativism is joined
again when Samson predicts that Dalila’s story will become an exemplum of marital
treachery and she offers a counter-interpretation from the Philistine perspective:
I shall be nam’d among the famousest
Of Women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded, who to save
Her countrey from a fierce destroyer, chose
Above the faith of wedlock-bands, my tomb
With odours visited and annual flowers.
Not less renown’d then in Mount Ephraim,
Jael who with inhospitable guile
Smote Sisera sleeping through the Temples nail’d. (982–90)