My father’s daughter: Deborah Milton’s biography of silence

Abstract

In The Tree of Knowledge (1990) Eva Figes re-creates the life of John Milton’s daughter, Deborah, who, due to the poet’s blindness, became the actual “hand” of the author. At the end of her life she gives us an alternative vision of the poet both as father and writer in a narrative which, as opposed to the centrality of Milton’s narratives, concentrates upon the marginal aspects of everyday life. Thus, in Figes’s novel the “grand narrative” constituted by Milton and his work is displaced by Deborah’s “petite histoire”, which paradigmatically exemplifies the role women have been assigned in History. That displacement of one narrative by another is in itself an occasion to re-con- sider the validity and the culturality of our notions of historical relevance.