Gender and the Public Sphere in Habermas andMilton: New Critical Directions

This essay assesses the evolving field of feminist scholarship on Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, especially the move from critique to dialogue and recognition of the uses of the public sphere in opening up democratic debate and in interrogating the relations between public and private. While Habermas has proven equally useful and productive for formulations of the public sphere in John Milton's prose and poetry, Milton scholarship has largely separated out the analysis of a political public sphere of implicitly masculine readers from discussions of gender, the private sphere, and Eve in Paradise Lost. Examples of more recent criticism, however, indicate how bridging gender and the public sphere and breaking down binaries between public and private can open new conversations about women and gender in Milton's political prose and about the political resonances of Eve and Eden in Paradise Lost.