"Another Skie": Eve's Eden and Feminine Cosmologies

Abstract

This paper offers a feminist perspective on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, particularly Eve’s characterization in the poem.  I argue that Eve’s subjectivity pushes against Milton’s masculinist paradigm, sometimes against the author’s will, and I read her speeches and actions as phenomenologically different from Adam's rather than ontologically feminine. Finally, I export Eve into Duchess Margaret Cavendish’s prose fiction, The Blazing World, which was published the year before Paradise Lost in mid-seventeenth century England. When understood through the lens of the Blazing World and using Cavendish’s analysis of difference, particularly gender difference, I show how Eve’s subjectivation is resolutely feminine on its own terms.