A Charitable Modernity: Milton and the Democratic Aesthetic

This thesis traces a narrative of John Milton\u27s modernity. My formulation of a \u27charitable modernity\u27 is a paradoxical one, and builds on Marshall Berman\u27s theory of modern life. Modernity is characterized by both disintegration and possibilities for renewal. Charity, according to Milton, is the means by which different readers are allowed to read different meanings into different texts. For Milton, a charitable modernity is a promising thing, because it makes allowance for a democratic kind of government where people are allowed to govern themselves in part by the way they each read texts differently. Milton was not always a poet of modernity, though, and as such, this thesis presents a history of that modernity as developed primarily in Milton\u27s poetry. In \u27On the Morning of Christ\u27s Nativity\u27 (1629), Milton presents an ordinary reading of the world, one that is not complicated by modernity, and where the mode of speech represents an irrefutable kind of meaning. In Lycidas (1637), the death of a friend corresponds to the death of that oral absoluteness of meaning; images and metaphors complicate meaning, presenting a problem for interpretive objectivity and also a possibility for the capacities of individual readers. In Paradise Lost (1667), the Fall corresponds to the ambiguity in the act of interpreting meaning, an ambiguity by which Adam and Eve literally create a democratic state for themselves. This uncertainty is tied crucially to Milton\u27s ideas of reason, which he defines as \u27choice.\u27 By reading Milton as a modern poet, we can see a model of democracy in which literacy becomes important, not because it presents an absoluteness of meaning, but because it accommodates a variety of interpretive positions