“In argument with men”: Dalila, Drama, and Masculine Heroism in Milton’s Samson Agonistes
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Drawing on Freud’s interpretation of the “fort-da” game, this paper examines Samson Agonistes as Milton’s rewriting of the narrative about Samson and Dalila. The paper argues that through the confrontation between the two biblical lovers, Milton demythologizes Samson’s heroism and probes the ideological content of the controversies surrounding Samson and his heroism in seventeenth-century England, when both Royalists and revolutionaries exploited his image as a political symbol. A comparison between Milton and Euripides is attempted in order to demonstrate that Milton’s choice of the genre is crucial in understanding his ideas about gender relationship and its impact on the construction of masculine heroic identity. My analysis of the dramatic confrontation between Samson and Dalila, in which the heroine makes an argument for herself, reveals the process through which Dalila’s image as a lethal woman has been constructed by male characters, including Samson, whose problems as a hero can be solved only by blaming the woman. Just as the “fortda” game serves for Freud’s grandson Ernst as a way to transform his anxiety into confidence and loss into mastery, Samson’s denigration of Dalila serves Samson to master his frustration of separation, symbolically presented as the betrayal of Dalila, and to regain his masculine identity. Dalila’s speeches, with which she defends her position just as the female characters do in Euripides’s plays, however, expose Samson’s anxiety about his insecure identity, the emptiness of male superiority, and its inevitable creation of gender hierarchy, as Milton unveils problems involved in the patriarchal construction of a hero.
Abstract
Drawing on Freud’s interpretation of the “fort-da” game, this paper examines Samson Agonistes as Milton’s rewriting of the narrative about Samson and Dalila. The paper argues that through the confrontation between the two biblical lovers, Milton demythologizes Samson’s heroism and probes the ideological content of the controversies surrounding Samson and his heroism in seventeenth-century England, when both Royalists and revolutionaries exploited his image as a political symbol. A comparison between Milton and Euripides is attempted in order to demonstrate that Milton’s choice of the genre is crucial in understanding his ideas about gender relationship and its impact on the construction of masculine heroic identity. My analysis of the dramatic confrontation between Samson and Dalila, in which the heroine makes an argument for herself, reveals the process through which Dalila’s image as a lethal woman has been constructed by male characters, including Samson, whose problems as a hero can be solved only by blaming the woman. Just as the “fortda” game serves for Freud’s grandson Ernst as a way to transform his anxiety into confidence and loss into mastery, Samson’s denigration of Dalila serves Samson to master his frustration of separation, symbolically presented as the betrayal of Dalila, and to regain his masculine identity. Dalila’s speeches, with which she defends her position just as the female characters do in Euripides’s plays, however, expose Samson’s anxiety about his insecure identity, the emptiness of male superiority, and its inevitable creation of gender hierarchy, as Milton unveils problems involved in the patriarchal construction of a hero.
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