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Milton's "Eco-Eden": Place and notions of the "Green" in Pradise Lost
College Literature, Fall 2001 by Pici, Nick
poets are ... there to help us understand the place, to come to know the earth. Jonathan Bate the nonhuman environment is a dominant character in the worlds both inside and outside the text; ... authors themselves subscribe to this belief, . . . and an important interaction occurs between nonhuman environment and author, Place and text, which can result in ... [an] insistence on the primacy of a physical world. Don Scheese
"wilderness" is nearly as much of a cultural expression of desire as "Eden." SueEllen Campbell
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Like Adam and Eve in Paradise, story and place seem to walk together hand in hand. Place has power to inspire stories and influence readers" responses to them; stories, meanwhile, have the power to make readers contemplate their external world and realize the significance, even sacredness, of place. Through their concrete formal representations, stories can clarify, enlarge, even construct nature and place in ways that cannot be accomplished by simply being within and contemplating an actual physical environment. Through stories, place can become more tangible and less elusive, clearer and brighter. An absence of stories, of course, would not necessarily prevent humans from gaining knowledge of the external realms or preclude us from cultivating a deep personal understanding of and appreciation for nature and place. (In other words, identification with nature and place is not contingent upon the existence of story.) Certainly, though, stories can help a person "internalize" nature and gain a clearer sense of the relationships between self and place. Milton's epic telling of Adam and Eve and their fall from Eden is such a story.
Paradise Lost is usually understood as a work primarily concerned with exploring the human inner self and humankind's relationship to a Christian God; and Milton certainly consumes himself in his epic with these types of explorations, with showing God's ways to humankind. It might seem inappropriate then to redirect critical attention away from such matters in order to focus on the poem's portrayals of the external, physical world of Eden and Adam and Eve's place within this world. An "eco-reading" of Paradise Lost, however, should in the end prove a viable critical enterprise. For skeptics who may still be dubious of this kind of reading, SueEllen Campbell offers up this rather clever and insightful "ornithological" apologia for a humanities-- based ecologism:
Magpies, I think, make good role-models for critics, teachers and students in the ways they embody the advantages of being inquisitive, of foraging, or building something new out of apparently unrelated scraps. They may make particularly good models for ecological writers and critics. Seeking to inhabit similarly marginal spaces between human and wild, in our explorations of new critical territory we too might thrive on an eclectic and improvisatory appetite. (Campbell 1998, 13)
Campbell's analogy provides and inviting gateway for an eco-reading of Milton's epic.
Paradise Lost, specifically those sections that describe Eden and Adam and Eve's relationships with nature both before and after the Fall, is more than just pastoral tour-de-force. These sections of the poem do more than dramatize an unattainable, escapist world where nature is intended to delight and please the senses of both fictional character and actual reader. While pastoral elements play an important role in establishing and reinforcing certain "green"2 themes of Paradise Lost (namely human appreciation of nature's inherent beauty and power to soothe the mind, body, and soul), there are other, less conspicuous green subtexts of Milton's paradise myth that should also pique modern-day sensibilities. Subtle undercurrents of green philosophy and ways of living, even certain inchoate ideas that presage an ecological science, are evident within the paradise Milton has constructed. Hidden beneath the author's striking sensuous imagery and luxurious pastoral descriptions of place are ideas of moderation and stewardship, the practicing of vegetarianism and gardening, pointed connections between God and nature, and an overarching picture of mutual, harmonious human living within nature. These are ideas and practices and visions that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) our living in what conventional Christian theology sees as a hostile and indifferent postlapsarian nature, apply to and are being realized or potentially could be realized in the world today. In fact, it is probably more crucial for our current world, one that is facing pronounced and increasingly dire environmental crises, to consider and attempt to enact such ideas, practices, and visions than it was for a world at any other time even in the paradisal "dream time" world of Adam and Eve.
Despite the fact that Paradise Lost is informed in many ways by traditional Western notions and interpretations of scripture that establish and sanction a hierarchical worldview in which humans are positioned above and preside over nature-a hierarchy that is explained and licensed through these very myths of Christian creation and nature's fall from grace-despite the fact that Milton himself may have embraced the Biblical idea that humans have "dominion" over nature, and despite the fact that such myths have had their part in perpetuating the ecologically unfriendly worldviews of today, there are aspects and passages of Paradise Lost that want to subvert or contradict the very ideas the poem seems to be espousing and thereby turn this human/nature hierarchy on its head. And while it might at first seem imprudent or presumptuous to label Milton in modern terms as an "unwitting environmentalist" or to call Paradise Lost a prototypical green work, there are certain attributes of Milton's epic (not to mention attributes of some of his minor poems) that would make a compelling case for these appellations.
