Gallery One Encountering Eve: A Guide

The opening chapter of this book offers a guide for the reader’s encounters with Eve’s afterlives. It introduces the subsequent sections of the book as functioning akin to galleries within an exhibition. The reader is informed of how chapters that follows the introduction curates a different thematic image of Eve, with the different parts within these sections providing the reader with interpretations, intertexts, and imaginings of the Bible’s first woman that have led to becoming her to be framed as a femme fatale, but that can also allow her to be viewed as a wise woman and a morning mother.

Gallery Two Sin

Eve is, according to popular views held in Western culture, the original temptress. In this section or ‘gallery’ of the book, my aim is to explore some of the textual and intertextual hooks and triggers that have allowed for the transformation of the first woman into the first femme fatale. For centuries, she has been framed as a negative ‘everywoman’, with countless interpreters claiming Genesis 2–3 as a prooftext for viewing women as inherently more sinful than men. Cumulatively, I consider how the image of Eve as a dangerous temptress has gained such considerable cultural currency, and question its damaging dominance over, and corruption of, equally viable images of her as a subversive wise woman or a mourning mother, which I explore in Galleries Three and Four.

Gallery Five Everywoman Eve

In the final chapter the reader is provided with a space to reflect on their various encounters with Eve’s afterlives throughout the book. Here they have the opportunity to think anew about the image of the Bible’s first woman, and, as they depart from the book, to challenge the dominant traditional framing of Eve as femme fatale. Instead the book encourages the reader to consider a more complex figure of Eve the Everywoman: transgressor, knowledge bearer and bringer of life.

Gallery Four Life

Within popular Western interpretative traditions, as well as the majority of modern works on the reception history of Adam and Eve, the first woman’s role as a mother has ultimately been eclipsed by her action in the garden. Nonetheless, Eve is, according to the Bible, the first female to give birth to a child and begin the cycle of human procreation, thus representing a potent symbol of female creative power. Furthermore, some of the most poignant aspects of Eve’s story are bound up in her maternity; she is mother to all living but her children will know mortality because of her actions; she will suffer pain and anguish in order to bring about new life; and she will experience the death of her second son Abel at the hands of her firstborn, Cain. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Eve’s motherhood is represented by a number of different trajectories growing out from the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish and Christian interpretations, visual art, and the work of pre-twentieth-century women writers. Each of these categories of interpretation offers their own unique insight into mother Eve, while also sharing considerable imagery and themes between them.

Gallery Three Knowledge

In this section of the book I consider the importance of knowledge in Eden, and examine how framing Genesis 2–4, and more importantly Eve, with wisdom rather than sin can bring new facets of the story and its female protagonist to light. Here, then, I will illustrate the ways in which Eve’s story can and has been read as the tale of an agent of knowledge, a mediator of culture in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a spiritual enlightener in texts from Nag Hammadi, and a feminist agitator in the work of Angela Carter.