Comus in the Wardrobe: Lewis’s Miltonic Feminine Spiritual Heroism in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Abstract

John Milton epitomizes seventeenth-century English literature’s redefinition of epic heroism, rejecting classical heroism in favor of the Christian heroic model. Similarly, C. S. Lewis infused into his Narnian heptalogy what Monika B. Hilder calls the “feminine ethos,” or Christian heroic virtues and actions which are culturally gendered feminine. Building off Hilder’s insights, this essay suggests links between Lewis and Milton regarding their engagement with heroism and gender by interrogating Miltonic intertextual echoes within The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a comparative reading informed by A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus). Classical masculine and feminine spiritual heroism models within Comus inspire Edmund’s and Lucy’s characterizations in their juxtaposed temptation scenes by the White Witch and Mr. Tumnus. Comus’s narrative structure allows Lewis to critique Edmund’s classical heroic ethos, while Milton’s Lady acts as a literary precursor for Lucy’s embodiment of a feminine spiritual heroism. In short, this essay argues that Lewis’s feminine spiritual heroic model is influenced by the Miltonic imagination. While scholars have documented Miltonic influences in Lewis’s Chronicles, this article adds to existing source and gender scholarship within Lewis studies by proposing a consideration of Milton’s poetics as influences for Lewis’s conception of a feminine spiritual heroism, an avenue of study not yet addressed in the literature. Reading Milton within the wardrobe helps audiences read further up and further into Lewis's fiction.

This essay is currently under review with Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal.

A Week with Shakespeare: Teaching Shakespeare Through Comics and Performance

Abstract

In this paper, I suggest a week-long unit plan, grounded in engagement with Shakespearean graphic novels and performance pedagogy, which can introduce and inspire students to have fun with Shakespeare. When teaching younger students, many teachers prefer modern prose retellings of Shakespeare’s plays, because of their suitably towards students’ interests and literacy levels. But I suggest Shakespearean graphic novels are uniquely suited to introducing middle schoolers to his plays, and teaching Shakespeare through a fusion of graphic novels and performance pedagogy embodies this unit’s methodological crux.

This unit plan, which I adapted for an academic summer camp based on weekly enrollment, offers a model for a condensed, week-long study of Shakespeare with middle schoolers within a variety of educational environments. In my setting, each play had to be taught within one week, and graphic novels provided a medium for students to get introduced to Shakespeare at an early age within a condensed time frame. The paper briefly reviews existing literature on teaching with comic books and theory related to the Shakespearean graphic novel, then proceeds to outline the week-long middle school unit plan, narratively explicating the day-to-day lessons of what class might practically look like. The unit plan is flexible enough for teachers to follow, modify, and implement their own version of a Shakespearean week within their classrooms.

This paper is currently in revision.

“Happy Birthday, John—Should We Divorce?”: Margaret Atwater Mason’s The Binding of the Strong, the American Divorce Debate, and Milton’s Tercentenary”

Abstract

1908 marked John Milton’s three hundredth birthdate, an event early twentieth-century American culture celebrated. While there were numerous literary Miltonic dedications presented within periodicals, American novelist Caroline Atwater Mason stands distinctive, publishing The Binding of the Strong: A Love Story in 1908. Mason’s novel presents a historically fictional adaptive narrative depicting Milton’s rumored affair with Dr. Davis’ daughter during Mary Powell’s marital desertion, a suggestion presented in a late seventeenth-century Milton biography typically attributed to John Phillips, Milton’s nephew. Interestingly, since 1867, America’s divorce rate rose, causing it to be a popular topic of conversation in speech and print.

Thus, I argue Milton’s tercentenary American celebration in 1908 brought with it a venue for Margaret Atwater Mason to add to the ongoing American discourse on divorce, as her novel deals with Milton’s love life and divorce tracts. Binding can be read as Mason either advocating for or against divorce, with socioreligious implications for either reading. I provide analysis from both perspectives, illustrating how reading Binding from conflicting standpoints empathetically honors Mason’s cultural moment. Mason’s novel can be read both ways because it should be read both ways; oppositional readings demonstrate Binding as a reflection of the attitudinal dichotomies towards divorce in America during the Progressive Era, and how a female writer used Milton to add her voice to the divorce dialogue.

This paper is currently in revision.

“That wicked band of villeins…in this place:” Spenser, Aristotle, and the Gothic Soul in Book II of The Faerie Queene

Abstract

Edmund Spenser’s late sixteenth-century epic poem The Faerie Queene has been considered within the Gothic mode since the eighteenth century. However, we must ask within what Gothic mode eighteenth-century critics conceptualized the poem. Romantic era critics like John Hughes and Richard Hurd conceptualized Spenser’s verse according to a medieval Gothic. However, these critics provoke us to consider a Spenserian Gothic within a framework largely indebted to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a work widely considered the first gothic novel. To date, Garrett Sullivan’s chapter “Vampirism in the Bower of Bliss,” in the edited collection, Gothic Renaissance: A Reassessment (2014), stands alone in its consideration of a post-Otranto Spenser. In this piece, I converse with Sullivan in my consideration of a Gothic Spenser within book II of The Faerie Queene. I specifically interrogate book II, cantos 9 and 11, episodes preceding the scenes Sullivan explores. I argue, when read through an Aristotelian framework, Maleger’s troops represent Alma’s sensitive elements which the castle defends against. But those sensitive, animalistic faculties are inherent to Alma as a rational soul. Alma is confronted with her repressed, or abjected, sensitive Aristotelian soul, which she seeks to overcome but can never cast off, for without that very soul, Alma is not Alma. Spenser represents a figure in the Renaissance proto-Gothic tradition, as the sensitive soul haunts not just the poem but humans ourselves, as we face those faculties of the soul which comprise us, yet simultaneously are not us.

This paper is currently in revision.