ABSTRACT
During the heyday of second-wave feminism, Milton was reviled as a “bogey” by women scholars who were trying to extricate themselves from the crippling burden of patriarchy (Froula). More recently, with the increasing popularity of ecocritical approaches to literature, Milton has fared rather better: his Eve is characterized as a proto-ecologist and Milton himself is hailed as a precursor of modern environmentalism and its solicitude for the well-being for Gaia, Mother Earth. The biblical book of Genesis, with its two contradictory versions of the creation story, offers two contrasting accounts of the relationship between the original humans and the natural world. The first version, traditionally termed the Priestly or P-text, emphasizes human dominion over nature: God blesses the first man and woman and tells them, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28, King James Version). The second version, traditionally termed the Yahwist or J-text, emphasizes human responsibility for nature: God creates Adam and places him in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it,” suggesting that human use of plants and animals is not based so much on sovereignty as on service (Genesis 2:15). In Comus, Milton famously puts an argument for human exploitation of nature in the mouth of the demonic enchanter himself, who argues that nature would not have “pour[ed] her bounties forth / With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, / Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks” were it not to “please and sate the curious taste” of her human masters. 1 To this the Lady responds with her own counterargument that emphasizes human responsibility and conservation of nature: If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pamper’d Luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well dispens’t In unsuperfluous even proportion (768–73)
