Towards the end of Paradise Lost, Milton adapts a passage from the biblical Book of Genesis (3:16) in which God punishes Eve for eating the forbidden fruit by cursing her to experience painful childbirth. In both Margaret Cavendish’s “Earth’s Complaint” and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the reader encounters descriptions of pain related to motherhood experienced by two non-human characters: Earth and Error. Write an essay that explores how Cavendish and Spenser use these “personified” mothers to educate and persuade their readers to a specific moral or argument. What responses do these writers hope their depictions of motherhood will elicit from their readers, and how do their depictions elicit these responses? You might also consider what poetic devices each writer uses, and what ideas, stories, or stereotypes of motherhood are invoked in each text.
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