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nostalgic perspective cultivated by his ‘old rambling mansion’ and permitted by the status which comes with his property, whereas Mrs Hardcastle maintains a vicarious involvement in her son’s life and malign ‘desire to keep […] secret’ his age so that she might be able to mollycoddle him for longer. It seems that in both texts, the conflict of ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ is most noticeable when emotion is aroused by attraction, fascination or fear, often to the point where it overwhelms reason. In Paradise Lost , attempting to quell Eve’s ambition to stray and claiming that man’s stance against temptation is strong, Adam explains to Eve that ‘within himself / The danger lies, yet lies within his power’, yet concedes that though man is free, he is susceptible to ‘some fair appearing good’, ‘misinform[ing] the will / To do what God expressly has forbid’, concluding that ‘reason’ is easily deceived by ‘some specious object by the foe suborned’. These comments seem more pertinent to Marlow in She Stoops To Conquer , however, for both instances when Marlow is confronted by Kate Hardcastle, he succumbs to ‘emotion’, at the expense of sacrificing his good ‘reason’. When in the company of Kate, owing to the rank ‘suborned’ by her,
Marlow’s reason is suppressed and he is reduced to ‘the modestest man alive’, a ‘trembling idiot’ scarcely able to converse. Alternatively, when misconstruing Kate to be a ‘barmaid’, Marlow is overcome by lascivious desire to ‘call for a taste […] for the nectar of [Kate’s] lips’, which overthrows his reason that would otherwise encourage him to behave with proper conduct. Comparably, in Paradise Lost Satan is so overawed by the bucolic beauty of Eden, lamenting ‘the more I see / Pleasures about me, so much more I feel / Torment within me, as from the hateful siege / Of contraries’, that he momentarily loses sight of his
The conflict of ‘reason’ and
‘emotion’ is most noticeable when emotion is aroused by attraction, fascination or fear
malicious drive for destruction. Furthermore, the ‘pleasure’ with which Satan ‘be[held] / This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve / Thus early, thus alone; her heavenly form / Angelic, but more soft, and feminine’ is made explicit by Milton, underpinned by an uncharacteristically sexually pun on ‘plat’ and ‘recess’, and lust displaces anger as ‘That space the evil one abstracted stood / From his own evil, and for the time remained / Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, / Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge’ until it is ultimately replaced by ‘reason’ and Satan’s infallible determination. Perhaps what should be most interesting is the presence of this highly sexualised language that Milton uses around Eve – ‘If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass, / What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more, / She most, and in her look sums all delight’ – when, as a postlapsarian writer, one might expect anathema, not desire, directed towards the agent of mankind’s Fall. Rostrevor Hamilton claims also that ‘the Satan created by Milton’s imagination was nobler and more admirable than the devil conceived by his intellect’, and again the reader can potentially see a discrepancy between how Milton could ‘reasonably’ view Eve and Satan, and how, when dramatised in poetry, Milton regards them. Although it is no doubt easy to see how ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are often in conflict, it does not seem accurate to assert that they are in ‘constant’ conflict, since in both texts there is a sense of resolution which halts conflict. Additionally, in She Stoops To Conquer , Goldsmith provides various examples of compromise, in which ‘emotion’, ‘reason’ and the suffering parties are reconciled. Although as Simon Bubb claims, ‘the play conforms to the definition of a comedy of manners, in which people who supposedly maintain certain social standards are seen in reality to behave less than nobly’, She Stoops To Conquer could instead be seen to contain characters more
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