The lady ‘immanacled’: Prisons of body and soul in Milton’s Comus

Abstract

John Milton’s 1634 Comus reworks the Boethian ‘body as prison of the soul (or mind)’ motif by using it to explore new possibilities within an established philosophical tradition. In the masque, the virginal body of the Lady becomes a prison of itself, while her soul (or mind) initially remains free. After interacting defiantly with Comus, the Lady’s mind also becomes entrapped, partly through apprehension of its own heroic virtue. Milton introduces an unusual gendering of the soul-body dichotomy in this masque: he associates the soul primarily with the female human protagonist, while the masculine demi-god Comus represents the body. Once the Lady is spellbound in Comus’ chair, her two brothers and a male Attendant Spirit attempt to rescue her, but she can be delivered from her immobility only by a female presence. The intervention of the nymph Sabrina eventually releases the Lady from her state of frozen virginity – a condition that is both admirable and transgressive within early modern constructions of feminine decorum. This article takes up a feminist perspective in tracing the Boethian variations developed in Comus and situates the masque within the transitional phase of Milton’s early intellectual development.
Contribution: This article on the seventeenth-century author, John Milton’s mask, Comus, contributes to the journal Literator’s focus on the study of literature.