SOURCE: “Milton on Women—Yet Once More,” in Milton Studies, Vol. VI, 1974, pp. 3-20.

In the following essay, Lewalski responds to a feminist study of Paradise Lost that looks at the work in terms of sociological role definitions and asserts that such analyses are limited in their ability to assess the true complexity of Milton's treatment of women and the universality of the poem's concerns.

It was bound to happen sooner or later—a feminist analysis of Milton on women. So bad, though, has been Milton's press on the “woman question” that the exercise might have seemed hardly worth the trouble, a merely ritual beating of a very dead horse. However, Marcia Landy's article, recently published in Milton Studies,¹ does not merely resurrect the stereotypes of Milton the misogynist importing his own domestic problems into his poems, or Milton the Puritan necessarily echoing and reaffirming the paternalistic ethos...