Stevie Davies

	MILTON

1	Better as a critical introduction for undergraduates is Stevie Davies's lively contribution to the Harvester New Readings series. Her brief presumably ran quite counter to Moseley's in that this is a series which is consciously and explicitly 'responsive to new bearings which have recently emerged in literary analysis'. Davies's primary theoretical and methodological focus is on gender politics: 'Sexuality is a major theme of the present book because it is an intense emotional and political preoccupation of Milton's poetry. My feminist approach is based on a perception that Milton at once identified himself with and vehemently disowned something female which was experienced as part of the self.' She is brightest when she sticks closest to this thesis. Her comments on Paradise Lost reopen the feminist debate it has occasioned in interesting ways, which perceive in the poem a complex of precise tensions: The Miltonic male at once idealises and looks down on the female ... but the power-structure he imposes as fortification to his ego is overturned in the love-relation ... Sexuality violates autonomy and therefore threatens the sense of safety. I think undergraduates will find much in this to ponder. Her perspective proves particularly rich in her discussion of Samson Agonistes, which 'plays out a familiar paradox': 'the male is enervated by his triumph; he is colloquially said to "die", his vigour "spent"; predator becomes prey ... male sexuality opens him to effeminacy.' Some may disagree with this as an account of the narrative of events in Samson, but it is a bold and committed reading which should stimulate some of Davies's intended undergraduate readership to debate.
	The Year's Work in English Studies, Vol 72

2	In this brief but densely detailed volume Stevie Davies, rising to the challenge of the Harvester series' title, delivers a genuinely 'new reading' of Milton and his works. Grounded in a close attention to language which acknowledges debts to Empson, Ricks and Fish, and employing psychological insights which recall Kerrigan but draw primarily on Davies's own Jungian and feminist studies, her reading also pays appropriate attention to the political, social, and cultural setting of the writer and his times. The result engages us in a Milton freshly imagined as accessible to modernist and even post-modernist sensibilities without being denied to more traditional perspectives. ... Her conclusion seeks certainty in neither traditional harmonizing, pietistic defences, nor in those revisions which deny entirely the stated meaning and intent of poems and author. The 'irresolvable conflicts' between filial roles and paternal power, between the capacity of 'naming' in language and the 'meaning' to which it aspires but can never attain, and all those other inevitable binaries of the fallen world are sharply revealed in Milton's life and works as both source and inner structure of expression. The strength of Davies's critical arguments, like the power she finds in Milton's works, derives from the refusal to allow 'such conflict[s] a less than ambivalent resolution' (p.205). This ambivalence in Milton is preserved even in the formal endings that paradoxically resist closure by invoking new beginnings; in Davies it is manifest in a continuing recognition that work rooted in a struggle at once to defend and to transcend 'subjective relativism' must itself be perpetually begun again in 'new readings'. Davies's Milton is a text which can be read with profit by Miltonists, who may or may not find agreement but will find stimulation, and by less experienced readers seeking a rich and enthusiastic vade-mecum.
	Review of English Studies, August 1994

3	Stevie Davies [stresses] the conflict between Milton's emotional commitment to harmony and his intellectual awareness of cosmic and linguistic instability. The chapter which outlines this approach is full of first-rate close readings of the prose particularly, and Davies's minute examination of Paradise Lost is responsive to the presence of a Spenserian sense of beauty and holiness (when did we last hear those words in literary criticism?) as well as of turbulence and strain. Much of the harmony in the poem is traced to Eve, who is seen as 'attaining a greater stability and certainty than any other character'. If Davies cannot make us warm to Paradise Regained, she at least explains its stylistic and ideological narrowness convincingly as 'a record of what can be said about silence and seen in blankness' (as if Beckett had taken to epic!). On Samson Agonistes, rejecting as oversimple the customary reading of the play as a positive spiritual pilgrimage, she explores it as Milton's final confrontation with the feminine in himself. Here, for the only time, I felt that she risked being over-ingenious; elsewhere her use of a feminist approach is temperate and helpful. I learned a good deal from this book, and was grateful for the rare elegance of its style as well as for the fertility of its ideas.
	English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol 73 No. 6