Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid

“A Happy Rural Seat of Various View”: Eve's Mirror Poem and Her Lapse in Paradise Lost

“…According to Maggie Kilgour's elegant reading of Eve's confrontation with her image reflected in the lake, Eve's “narcissism” is but an embryonic stage in her growing perception of herself and of her relation to her world, a stage that she is able and at liberty to progress beyond by breaking the shackles of her selfhood and turning toward the possibility of the other. Kilgour explains:

Unlike [Ovid's] Narcissus, who entertains choice only to evade it, or Homeric heroes whose actions are willed by Zeus, Eve faces and makes a real choice.

…”