Miranda's Daughters: Women's Ecological Thinking in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

This dissertation examines women’s ecological thinking in seventeenth-century English literature as England transitioned to an agrarian-capitalist economy built on the intensified exploitation of the nonhuman world. More specifically, the women examined here raise serious concerns about the ways in which economic change and intellectual discourse together encouraged the more intensive use of the nonhuman world for humankind’s gain during this period. The Introduction explains how property law, agricultural practices, and environmental policies shifted in seventeenth-century England, and details the project’s methodology, Marxist ecofeminism. Chapter 1 contends that the female figures in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and John Milton’s A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) repurpose the Early Stuart court masque, which was designed to legitimize royal power by representing it in an idealized way, to instead criticize the ruling classes for asserting and sustaining their power by dominating the nonhuman world. Chapter 2 builds on the former by arguing that Lucy Hutchinson, Aemelia Lanyer, and Margaret Cavendish appropriate the country-house poetic genre to condemn estate lords for similar behavior. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Anne Bradstreet’s verse re-energizes the New England Puritan model of stewardship, which viewed agricultural labor as an expression of love for God and his creation, as a way of resisting the intensified exploitation of the nonhuman world in colonial New England. Chapter 4 compares Fifth Monarchists Mary Cary’s and Anna Trapnel’s prophetic writings with Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666): While Cary and Trapnel portray the prophesied New Jerusalem as a refuge in which the nonhuman world will no longer be “abused by men that are unreasonable,” as Cary says, Cavendish both fantasizes about the Empress of the Blazing World’s scientific and technological control of nature and warns against the tremendous harm this power can inflict on other human beings and nature itself. Last, the Coda examines Eve’s earnest, if imperfect, efforts to steward Eden with care in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667-1674). Taken together, Miranda and Eve serve as bookends of a longer story about humankind’s failed stewardship of, and active efforts to turn a profit on, the nonhuman world in seventeenth-century England