ABSTRACT
The confluence of libidinal and political meanings is partly what is meant when religion is referred to as the dominant ideology, or master code, of John Milton’s society. Milton’s enactment of his own poetic nativity coincides with the cryptic allegorical birth of a collective project, a project that may quite properly be described in libidinal-political terms. When one speaks of the sexual politics of a writer’s work, this usually implies that the relation between the work’s political meaning and its tacit recommendations about sexuality is a relation, not simply of intimacy, but of near unity, because sexuality is quintessentially political, and vice versa. As the object of regulatory institutions, sexuality represents one of the nodes of a definite socio-political regime. Michel Foucault makes the figure of the Hysterical Mother one of the chief “controlling images” produced by the socio-political regime of sexuality. Chastity was a privileged theme of the court masque when Comus was written.
