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My dissertation, Re-Pairing Passion: Milton’s Poetics of Embodied Education, explores how Milton’s depiction of passion establishes an innovative early modern phenomenology of feeling that prefigures our modern understanding of emotional experience. In the 17th century, at the peak of the debate about the passions and how one should relate to them, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, which presents the complex affective lives of Adam and Eve as archetypal humans. Re-Pairing Passion proposes reading Paradise Lost as a pedagogical tool that offers readers complex models for passionate living in each of the poem’s characters. Milton’s portrait of passion reflects his belief in monism, the early modern idea that body and mind are indivisibly united, unlike modern dualism, which treats them as separate. I argue that Paradise Lost is a pedagogical tool intended to educate by portraying passion that provokes readerly emotion.
The five chapters of the dissertation trace the connections between passion, embodiment, and affective experience shared communally with others across Milton’s literary career. The Introduction, “‘Radicall Humour and Passion’: Feeling Bodies in Early Modern England,” situates Milton within the broader historical movements related to monism and the influx of literature aimed at educating readers on governing their passions. Chapter 1, “Affective Dialectic: Milton’s Non-System of Passion,” breaks down passion and its lexical variants in Milton’s entire corpus outside of Paradise Lost. I analyze how Milton uses the language of passion across his works through a series of focused case studies, including his avoidance of passion concerning Christ’s Passion, the musical attunement of harmonizing tempers, and the Aristotelian cathartic power of passion through zealous excess. Building from this foundational vocabulary of passion, the next three chapters outline a series of heuristic models of passionate living that Milton utilizes as didactic exemplars for leading virtuous and passionate lives. Chapters 2 and 3 form a two-part investigation of the demonic model of passionate living and its relationship with the representations of deforming bodies and minds. Chapter 2, “Tempering the Tempter: Satan’s Deforming Passions,” establishes the connection between early modern disability and Satan’s self-perceived impairment at the moment of his fall. This chapter begins the argument that Satan’s processual deformation is directly linked to his relationship with passion; continuing in Chapter 3, “Demonized Passions: Satan’s Monistic Metamorphosis,” follows the progression of animal transformations that break down Satan’s angelic form. Both chapters contend that the deforming bodily representations of the fallen act as a mirror for the descent into an untempered, passionate existence. Chapter 4, “Transportive Passion: Edenic ‘Commotion’ versus Satanic ‘Compulsion’,” transitions from the Satanic to the human model of passionate living and explores the reparative power of innocent passion. This chapter reevaluates Adam’s first experience of passion, which he labels as a “Commotion strange,” as a “co-motion” or communal movement representing the epitome of innocent social relationships.
Together, these chapters show that Paradise Lost is not only an exploration of the complexity of passion, but also a pedagogical project that teaches readers how to live and feel in relation to others. My dissertation shifts critical attention away from efforts to define or discipline the passions and instead emphasizes how Milton stages passion as a site of ethical and ontological formation. Drawing on his monist framework, which unites body and soul, I argue that Milton presents passion as a generative force of learning, discernment, and repair. Re-Pairing Passion situates Milton’s emotional vocabulary within a broader vision of embodied experience, contrasting his investment in affective interconnection with the fragmented individualism associated with Cartesian dualism. By tracing how passion moves across bodies, texts, and relationships, this project reframes emotion as a vital means of knowing, relating, and becoming, both in Milton’s time and our own.
