There was a ccollection of critical essays published in the '80s entitled "Feminist Milton." In fact, there is a fairly substantial body of criticism written along these lines -- this in spite of the fact that one can quote quite a few passages from Milton explicitly affirmining male domination. And of course Milton issued the first explicit attack on the pre-capitalist family in the form of his divorce pamphlets. A loosening of family ties is implicit in the contept of marriage grounded in romantic love, developed in Shakespeare, Spenser, & Milton, who theorized it: Marriage is desgned to 'solve' the problem of loneliness, and if a marriage fails to provide that service, then it is not a legitimate marriage and should be dissolvable. In ancient literature, romantic love is for the most part treated as a disease, curable by seducing the woman. (Ovid's Art of Love offers no advice on proposing marriage.) In Provencal poetry it is clearly an adulterous relationship only. There is a good deal of sexual passion in the Metamomorphoses, but not in the story of ideal marriage, that of Bacuis and Philemon, at the center of the poem. That marriage is simply a given, not a deliberately fromed relationship between two independent (abstract) individuals. But when we turn to PL, there is a whole series of Boy gets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy gets Girl... First of these is Adam sees the cr4ation of Eve from his side in a dream; he wakes up and she is gone. Then he finds her, but she turns away, then he gets her consent. Then there is the Eve's dream (inspired by Satan) is one in which Adam loses her to Satan, she wakes up, Adam gets her back. Then the long Separation scene in Book 9: Adam loses her and doesn't get hr back until after the Fall when he joins her her in some hot se . Then they quarrel, & he loses her again. Then they make up. Then at the end she dreams while Michael takes Adam on his tour of hisotyr, then she wakes up, and the two walk into the sunset hand in hand. Far from being the given, existing from the beginning, as in all non-capitalist societies, marriage is an extremely complex relationship between two individuals, coming from nowhere as it were and by an act of will forming a human society where none exxisted before. It took another three centuries, including a lot of bloodshed, for the implications of PL (i.e., bourgeois equality) to work themselves out in actual history, but the ideollogical grounds for that working out are retty clear in PL itself.*
Tamas also answers this question pretty fully in his "Telling the Truth about Class," which I've mentioned several times. As he puts it, for the last two centuries the socialist movement had been essentially Rousseauian rather than Marxist -- a struggle for equality, while Marx's emphasis was on freedom, not equality, which he rejecteed. Tamas argues that the struggle for equality is mostly over, though obviously there are a lot of loose ends (e.g., the difference between citizen and alien migrant).
Carrol
(*There is an interesting discussion of the two contasting creation stories in Genesis by Arendt in _The Human Condition_, but I read that oo long ago to say anything about it here.)
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Apr 16, 2010, at 10:38 PM, SA wrote:
>
> > Barney Frank can be an out member of Congress more because of the
> > legacy of the liberation movements of the 60's and 70's than because
> > of the alleged libertarianism of the neoliberal era.
>
> Sure, the movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a lot to do with it.
> But where did they come from? I thought that the standard story of the
> emergence of modern homosexuality was that capitalism loosened family
> ties and created the urban space for the development of gay
> subcultures that more and more emerged from the underground. And after
> the initial burst of gay liberation 40 years ago, capitalist society
> was able to absorb the demands of sexual minorities - rather like
> feminism (which is related to the widely hated Walter Benn Michaels
> argument about identity and neoliberalism). What capitalism could
> never recuperate are the demands of labor for power and redistribution.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>