Our General Mother:’ Eve’s Mythic Power and the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett, and Christina Rossetti

The purpose of this study is to analyze Ameilia Lanyer, John Milton, Elizabeth Barrett, and Christina Rossetti’s versions of Eve. In my first chapter, I pair Lanyer and Milton’s work and focus on the demands and expectations they place on the reader. Both authors desire that their readers be intellectually and spiritually astute enough to accept their arguments about Eve, but also be willing to see themselves as Eve. In my second chapter, I discuss Milton’s influence on Barrett, and center my treatment of Barrett on the way Barrett’s ambivalence toward male authority manifests itself in her depictions of Eve. In my third chapter, I link Lanyer and Rossetti’s work for the purpose of examining their emphasis on the body of Eve and Christ. This study explores the way these authors use Eve to evoke societal and theological change and appeal to the power latent within Eve herself as a figure of mythic proportions.