Milton Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2006

Anna K. Nardo. George Eliot’s Dialogue with John Milton. Colum-bia and London: U of Missouri P, 2003. 278pp. ISBN 0-8262-1465-7. $37.50 (cloth).

MARGARET J. ARNOLD

Anna Nardo’s stimulating study, George Eliot’s Dialogue with JohnMilton, brings “these differently gendered but powerful intellects together[. . .] to explicate Eliot’s strenuous dialogue with Milton’s life and art—a dialogue that animated the epic novels she wrote for an age of unbelief ” (12). She helps the reader adjust both to seventeenth- andnineteenth-century contexts by introducing a brief history of Eliot’sreading of Milton in an era when Paradise Lost and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’sProgress were familiar texts. In her youth, Eliot cited Comus in her cor-respondence. Her later encounters with biographies by Thomas Keight-ley and David Masson stimulated her interest in Milton as a reformer,while her oral reading of Paradise Lost with George Henry Lewes led toher consideration of the kind of epic novel she might write.

Nardo’s history of Eliot’s reading is valuable for conceptualizing “dia-logues” with authors of different periods up to and including our own.After mentioning feminist and other concepts of authorial “anxiety”about earlier great writers, she provides a clear elucidation of Bakhtin-ian dialogue, a framework that is very helpful.The book is organized intwo major sections, framed by an introduction and conclusion. Part 1focuses on Eliot’s mid-career novels which reimagine the legends of“Milton,” the cultural icon of the nineteenth century. Part 2 turns toEliot’s engagement with the poetry itself in a sequence of novels. Theconclusion returns to “a virtual autobiography of reading” (2) in the storyof Maggie Tulliver’s childhood books in The Mill on the Floss.

In Keightley’s biography, Eliot found useful legends about Milton’sprivate life, especially Mary Powell’s desertion and his daughters’ laterservice as scribes. Another legend less familiar to many current readersis “Young Milton and the Italian Beauty,” in which a young woman fallsin love with him as he sleeps. Nardo supplies reproductions of picturesand accounts of novels representing Mary Powell and Leonora Baroni toreinforce the legendary material.

Turning to fiction, Nardo illustrates Eliot’s revisions of father-daughter legends in Romola, fashioning a daughter who follows twofathers. She reads aloud to her blind scholar-father and later finds herself

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden 02148, USA.

76

using the skills she has learned to evaluate her spiritual father, Savonarola.Unlike Milton’s daughters, Romola becomes her fathers’ intellectual andspiritual heir. Nardo asserts that Eliot rewrote legends “quite consciously”(84), a process difficult to assess.

Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch touches Miltonic legends as adaughter wanting to assist a great man and a wife to Casaubon whoreplaces Milton’s unfortunate choice with the “soul mate he seemed tolong for in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” (88). Nardo tracesDorothea’s courtships through allusions to Paradise Lost. At first seeing inCasaubon a reflection of her own yearning for an angel of light, she isdisappointed by his “Satanic” isolation, pride, and envy (94). With WillLadislaw, she participates in mutual conversation in a garden. She alsoconvinces him that they need to work in a fallen world in need ofreform, so that he will “stumble toward a life that takes the shape ofMilton’s” (107).

After asserting that Dorothea becomes the most Miltonic characterin the novel, Nardo refocuses her discussion on Middlemarch to beginSection 2, “Eliot and the Stories Milton Told.” She measures father-figures by the standards of their own words or their dialogue with others.Another illustrative choice lies in the contrasts of the Casaubon andLydgate households. She compares them both with Adam and Eve dis-cussing the issue of working separately, contrasting the freedom Dorotheagains with the constriction Lydgate and Rosamund experience. Finally,in Dorothea’s helpful words, which reconcile Lydgate and Rosamund,Nardo sees Eliot adapting Milton for a secular age, replacing grace withthe charity of fellow-feeling in a difficult world. In Nardo’s terms, “Eliotfinds heroism still possible. Although Dorothea’s heroism is distinctly Miltonic, its foundation is not Christian doctrine but secular science”(133). Although her juxtaposed scenes and her description of charitableheroism are enlightening, I hoped for some recognition that caritas wasalso important to John Milton.

Moving from the useful juxtaposition of paradisal scenes in Middle-march to consider other novels, Nardo stresses Eliot’s genuine engage-ment with Milton’s shorter poems in Adam Bede. In a very interestingand sensitive reading of this early novel, Nardo finds repeated citationsof L’Allegro and Il Penseroso as well as Lycidas. Emphasizing the novel’s“critique of the Miltonic pastoral” (140), she poses Hetty and Dinah asthe tutelary goddesses of Milton’s companion poems; yet Hetty person-ifies a male fantasy, and Dinah, although a radiant good shepherd, leavespreaching for wifehood.

Chapter 7, “ ‘The Freedom of My Mind’: Maggie’s Trials and theLady of Comus,” is one of the book’s finest. In contrast to Adam Bede,in which women are bound by class and gender norms, Maggie “insiststhat her nonconforming identity be recognized” (168). Although Nardo

Milton Quarterly 77

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

finds echoes of Paradise Lost, she argues that Maggie’s life of privationand temptation evokes the fallen world of Comus. On her trip down theriver with Stephen, Maggie is robbed of free movement, but her mindis free to refuse temptation. In contrast to the Lady in Milton’s pastoral,who rejoins her class and family, Maggie has no home, finally living ina kind of exile. Nardo suggests that the final flood in the novel movesbeyond realism into another register, “seemingly providential” (183).As Maggie becomes a rescuer for Bob Jakin and Tom, she resembles the water nymph Sabrina, bringing a spiritual revelation for Tom: “Andfor Eliot the agnostic, such acts of love and forgiveness can arrest theprocesses of post-Darwinian nature. [. . .] a flood that both is and is nota rescue, both is and is not a manifestation of grace” (188).This chapteris especially impressive although Nardo, not Eliot, quotes the lines fromMilton that suit the action.

Chapters 8 and 9—on Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda—emphasizeEliot’s heroines in settings of wider historic moment than the domestic.Felix Holt introduces the rather fragile Esther, whose stepfather strugglesfor reform. In him (Rufus), a “ranter” born outside his time, she alsorevises the legend of Milton as a loving husband and father. In FelixHolt, a strong, longhaired, and abstemious figure, she refashions aSamson-like reformer who, however, lacks Samson’s religion. AlthoughFelix views Esther as a Dalila who would domesticate him, she insteadendures Samson-like trials, finally testifying for Felix to save him. Nardosuggests that Felix and Esther have, finally, a secular calling to love andminister to others in need. In spite of the excellent use of the Samsonand Esther stories, I had some difficulty separating the biblical Samsonfrom the Miltonic one in this section.

Nardo continues her emphasis on Eliot’s attraction to Miltonic moralchoice in placing Daniel Deronda alongside Paradise Regained. Comuscitations are also present. Eliot’s heroine, Gwendolyn Harleth, shares thename of Sabrina’s cruel stepmother and confronts temptations to choosesterility or forgiveness. In Daniel Deronda’s quest to find a mission forhis life, Nardo argues, Eliot revises Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained.From an “austere son” she fashions “a new kind of hero, one who growsinto his salvific mission through his passionate empathy with sufferingwomen” (244). After he fails to save his mother, in scenes that juxtaposeher rejection of a son with Milton’s Mary, he “saves” Gwendolyn fromdespair and rescues the Jewish exile Mirah from a father who wouldcontrol her future. Nardo accepts F. R. Leavis’s dismissal of Daniel as a“woman’s creation” with the counter that Milton’s Jesus is decidedly aman’s creation. For me, both Eliot’s Daniel and Milton’s Jesus suffer pas-sively although certainly in different ways.

Nardo concludes her work on “dialogue” with an impressive dis-cussion of the effect of reading men’s works on her heroine Maggie

78 Margaret J. Arnold

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Tulliver, whose exposure omits the works of John Milton. In Defoe,Bunyan, Mme. de Stael, Thomas à Kempis, and Walter Scott, Maggielearns about witches, passivity, and sorrow. Yet instead of waiting for aliberator, Maggie becomes one through her creator’s dialogue withComus. Nardo sums up her major thought well:

In her lifelong dialogue with Milton, her literary father,Eliot directly challenged and engaged his pastoral vision;objectified and talked back to him in Bardo, Savonarola,Rufus Lyon, and Casaubon; set the stories about him indialogue with the stories he told; and redefined heroismand salvation through regendering the Miltonic hero.

(260)

The entire study informs and challenges readers of both Milton andEliot. A student of either author finds adequate contexts and explana-tions to follow each comparison even when some works are less famil-iar than others. The framework of Bakhtin’s concepts is particularlyhelpful. For this reader, at least, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar are lessso because their attacks on Milton’s “bogey” have eroded with time.As a reader, I was impressed by Nardo’s juxtaposed scenes, although Iwonder how unique the issue of temptation in literature is to Miltonrather than, say, Spenser. Some allusions to Dayton Haskin on Mary andmore recent works by Barbara Lewalski on Milton’s life and Joseph Wittreich on Samson would be welcome. Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting and helpful “afterlife of Milton” works I have read.

University of Kansas

Milton Quarterly 79

© 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.