Two views of a new book that looks at the legacy of the mythical first woman – and what men have made of her
FOR
Natasha Fairweather
THE STORY OF EVE by Pamela Norris (Picador)
The history of human society might have followed a rather different course if the theologians of both the Jewish and the Christian faiths had focused more on the Bible’s egalitarian first account of creation rather than its divisive second one.
Chapter one of Genesis has the creator fashioning the world, along with man and woman (“In the image of God created He him: male and female created He them”), in six days, and bidding all his progeny to “be fruitful and multiply”. Chapter two tells the complex, contradictory story of original sin and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden by an inscrutable deity who operates on a far more human scale.
Prejudice against Eve, whose frailty, curiosity and disobedience led her to eat the forbidden fruit and open the biblical gateway to human suffering, has profoundly influenced the perception and treatment of women in Judaeo-Christian society ever since. And it is this long-term cultural effect of the story of Eve which Pamela Norris examines in her dense and wide-ranging history.
Norris reminds us that monotheism’s greatest challenge was to explain death and human suffering. For, if an omnipotent deity had created everything on Earth, why should human life begin and end with pain?
Norris draws on an impressive range of texts to demonstrate how a variety of different and often contradictory ideas fed into the story of Eve – from the Pandora and Psyche myths of the classical era to the medical treatises of late antiquity, with their bizarre theories about menstruation, the process of conception and the fleshiness of women; from the formation of Jewish law in the Talmudic era with its focus on regulating the reproductive functions of women to the early Christian association of women with base, uncontrolled carnality. She goes on to explore Eve’s legacy in art and literature through the ages.
Norris is particularly astute at tracing the evolution of the early Christian cult of virginity and sexual abstinence. The fact that Christianity venerated the Virgin Mary as its supreme image of motherhood is an enduring source of irony, providing women with an inimitable role model.
The strongest section of the book is an analysis of how the early church’s squeamishness about female sexuality was often polarised by the idealised figure of Mary and the demonised Eve.
Less successful is the second section of the book that draws on a huge variety of texts to explore literary ideas about Eve. Norris resorts simply to recounting the plot of book after book in tedious detail.
>From the moment Adam was given the power of naming creation (giving Eve a Hebrew name thought to mean “giver of life”, but also linked to the Aramaic and Arabic words for “snake”), language has been in the male domain. The Story of Eve is a small step towards Eve reclaiming her own story.
AGAINST
Julie Burchill
THE STORY OF EVE by Pamela Morris (Picador)
I blame Angela Carter, with her (allegedly) feminist fairytales. Up until then, we didn’t have either the time or the inclination for whimsy; women aren’t children, a fact men have only acknowledged recently, and we don’t need bedtime stories. We don’t need myths; we need more of the truth.
One minute it was the Seventies and Women’s Libbers were hoisting flour bombs at Miss World and not bothering with make-up and generally having a whale of a time, and then the next thing it was the Eighties and feminism, if you please, and women were suddenly meant to stop demanding all the fun stuff that men had, like careers and cash, and celebrate our feminine “power” instead. This power meant growing your hair and piling on the slap and “expressing” yourself through clothes, that is, acting like a drag queen.
Overnight a whole generation of men who were just getting used to women drinking pints and swearing, and quite liked it since it reminded them of the people they most wanted to hang out with after all, their mates, had to get used to women who, having completed one cultural studies course too many, simpered like Salome, sashayed like Sheba and laughed like Lilith. And who, after half a shandy, invariably referred to herself as a Daughter of Eve.
You can’t move for myths these days; anyone who fancies themselves as any sort of feminist scholar is running around dusting down every Wicked Woman ever dreamed up. That is, I think, what makes books like The Story of Eve so very annoying: that so much feminist intellectual energy is going into “reclaiming” women who were not only reviled and defeated, but not even real – merely created by men to prove some point about female perfidy. From Sappho to Barbara Castle, the roll-call of heroines is tried and true, yet the tomes about Melusine the Fairy keep on coming.
And Eve, of course, is the mother of all myths. Pamela Norris’s book is not silly, but perhaps its very seriousness is equally inappropriate. Why the hell should we care what a bunch of depressed, deluded, dead men said about a woman who never existed? When they’re handing out the gongs at the great awards ceremony in the sky, it is very likely that Madonna, bless her, will get more credit for her effect on the written word than on the musical form.
Just as Trollope’s Becky Sharp was recently re-invented as a Material Girl, so Eve is presented here as “a thoroughly modern woman who chews the apple of knowledge with gusto and wouldn’t dream of offering Adam a bite”. She’s In Yer Face – She’s Naked – She’s Eve!
Having said that, Norris has done all her reading – and rather her than me. Because after 460 pages, all I knew about Eve was what I had known before: that men have always treated women like dirt, and that if Eve hadn’t been invented then some old rabbi would have dreamed up some other poor cow to take the rap. She is a male fantasy figure, and as such a bore.
All the usual male chauvinist suspects are here: “Saint” Paul, who always comes across as extremely spiteful, Zeus, full of himself as usual, and that bastard Aslan the Lion, forever picking fault with Susan for wanting a nice pair of nylons to see her through the Narnia winter.
Add to this chorus old killjoy Hans Christian Andersen, condemning the Little Mermaid to a totally crap life, and bloody Socrates – typical man! – and you understand why Girl Power just had to happen. Satan, curiously, escapes both ridicule and censure; as Angela Carter did with the Marquis de Sade, he appears to have become a Friend of Feminism by default, because of his opposition to religious hypocrisy.
While the intention of a book like this is undoubtedly progressive, the conclusion is profoundly and embarrassingly conservative; oh, please don’t you big strong men keep calling us names! It really hurts our feelings, you know!
Personally I’m from the sticks-and-stones school of feminism; I don’t care what any man says about me or what any man says about Eve. I believe she was interesting for one reason only. That is, that she was the only woman in the history of the world (apart from Elizabeth Hurley) who had to put on some clothes in order to get famous.