Ecofeminist Eve: Artists Reading Milton’s Heroine

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Diane Kelsey McColley, Richard DuRocher, and Ken Hiltner, among others, have shown us how deeply concerned Milton was with issues that we today would call ``environmental.''1 Thanks to their work, we have come to see how Paradise Lost meditates upon the fragile connection between human beings and the oikos, or ``house,'' of nature. This relatively new interest in the environment of Paradise has coincided (certainly in McColley's work, but also elsewhere) with critics' rising interest in Eve---not simply as the agent somehow responsible for the Fall, but as an embodiment of what can be read, anachronistically but appropriately, as ecofeminist values.2 Illustrators of Milton have long anticipated this pair of concerns so central to contemporary Milton criticism. In fact, in and after the 1820s, about the time the word ``ecology'' came into English usage, readings of the poem we could call ecofeminist became dominant among Milton's visual critics and continued to dominate visual readings during the first half of the twentieth century.