‘We are little battlefields: in us, reason and emotion are constantly at war’. Reason and emotion in John Milton’s Paradise Lost Books IX & X and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer .
Noah Cooper Year 13
hose sentiments which Milton expressed in 1644 (published in Areopagitica, through which he urged Parliament to rescind their new Licensing Order) that ‘when god gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing’, re-emerge most profoundly in Book IX of Paradise Lost , during Adam and Eve’s spat over whether to ‘divide [their] labours’. In this conflict, Milton appears to champion ‘reason’, here represented allegorically by Adam, though it is ‘emotion’ – symbolised by Eve – which triumphs. Conversely, in Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer , whilst the Early Modern English upper-middle class – encapsulated by the Hardcastle family and guests – appear to subscribe to John Byng’s view of Englishmen as ‘precarious, uncertain, wild, enduring mortals’, ‘emotion’ is seemingly overcome by ‘reason’ at the play’s harmonious resolution, a union which is in some ways mirrored also in Milton’s conclusion of Book X. It is clear from both texts, however, that within us all there are conflicts between reason and emotion, although this conflict is perhaps not ‘constant’, as Milton and Goldsmith suggest that there exists the possibility of peaceable conflict resolution. Ostensibly, Adam and Eve and likewise Mr and Mrs Hardcastle can be seen as literary interpretations of a Cartesian mind-body dualism. Descartes, attempting to elucidate the distinction he saw between the ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’, wrote in 1641 that ‘those things which we conceive clearly and distinctly as being diverse substances, as we regard mind and body to be, are really substances essentially distinct one from the other’ [trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane]. Moreover, the Cartesian belief that the content of the mind presides over the fallible operation of the senses seems merely another perspective on the conflict between ‘reason’ (or mind) and ‘emotion’ (or sense/body). Notably, Milton and Descartes are contemporaries, and both appear to prioritise thought over experience in terms of validity. However it is not so simple to say that Adam solely represents ‘reason’ and thus Eve ‘emotion’; rather they seem to represent differing and ultimately dissonant forms of ‘reason’: Adam advocates a simple ‘reason’, which aligns rationality with godliness, claiming that ‘God left free the will, for what obeys / Reason, is free, and reason he made right’; Eve’s rendering of reason is more starkly pragmatic, focusing less on morality and more upon utilitarian efficacy: to divide their workload, to increase productivity and reduce ‘interven[ing]’ ‘looks’, ‘smiles’ and ‘casual discourse’. Nevertheless, as their dispute draws on, they both succumb to ‘emotion’, as Adam surrenders to effete uxoriousness and Eve to incensed independence, leading ultimately to Adam granting Eve permission to divide their work and cleave their union. Similarly, Mr and Mrs Hardcastle also engage argumentatively at the outset of She Stoops To Conquer , and can equally not be distilled into crude embodiments of only ‘reason’ or ‘emotion’, since whilst both function at a competent level of reasoning, capable of rapid comedic rebuttals, Mr Hardcastle possesses an overbearing nostalgia, fond of ‘everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine’, relishing the T
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