The “Nature” of Sovereignty &
the Female Intellectual in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
By Megan Trotter
Female Sovereignty as Access to Literature
• Rise in consumerism—rise
in female readership and
politicized female
authorship
• In Genesis, Eve caused Fall
when she ate from the Tree
of Knowledge
• Would intellectual
overreaching of women in
17th century be equally
catastrophic?
Georges Batailles on Sovereignty
• Reign of Elizabeth I fueled
discourse interested in
female sovereignty
• For Batailles: “that which
is opposed to the servile
and subordinate”
• Servile to work, servile to
seek knowledge
• Sovereign moment: when
anticipation meets
disappointment
Shifting Topography of the Book Culture
• The book as a commodity symbolizing wealth
• Female idleness—female readership
• Politicized female authorship
• Genesis-inspired tradition of gender debate:
protofeminine arguments vs. gynophobic attacks
Adam’s labor-mindedness
Eve’s connection to nature
“So ye shall die perhaps,
by putting off
Human, to put on gods,
death to be wished,
Though threatened,
which no worse than
this can bring”
-Satan to Eve
(Book IX; lines 713-15)
Works Cited
Batailles, Georges. “What I Understand by Sovereignty.” The Accursed
Share: Volume 3. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books,
1991. 197-237. Print.
Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Inventing the Early Modern Woman Reader
through the World of Goods: Lyly’s Gentlewoman Reader and
Katherine Stubbes.” Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and
Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Ed. Heidi Brayman
Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008.15-35. Print.
Legler, Gretchen T. “Ecofeminist Literary Criticism.” Ecofeminism:
Women, Culture, Nature. Ed. Karen J. Warren. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. 355-618. Print.
Works Cited
Miller, Shannon. “Serpentine Eve: Milton and the Seventeenth-Century
Debate Over Women. Milton Quarterly 42.1 (2008) 44-68. MLA
International Bibliography. Web. 7 Nov. 2009.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. 8th. New York: Norton & Company, 2006. Print.
Pruitt, Kristin A. “Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity.” Gender
and the Power of Relationship: “United as one individual soul” in
Paradise Lost. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003. 45-59.
Print.
Acknowledgments
Kevin Curran, PhD
Deborah Needleman Armintor, PhD
Susan Brown Eve, PhD
Gloria Cox, PhD