Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.1
The story of Eve, the first woman in creation in the canonical Judeo-Christian tradition, is found in Genesis 1-5 of the Tanakh or the Old Testament of the Bible. Genesis 3 narrates how while in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve decided to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God’s instruction to Adam not to do so. While both of them actively ate the fruit of the tree (as Genesis 3.6 narrates that ‘she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate’), Eve has widely been regarded as the central figure in the story because she was the primary sinner, and because the serpent approached her rather than Adam. It is this that has led to the dominant perception of Genesis 3 as typified by Eve’s interaction with the serpent and her subsequent eating of the fruit, as exemplified by Katie Edwards who in her analysis of the use of Eve imagery in contemporary women’s advertising speaks frequently of the ‘moment of transgression’ (implying a single transgression) in reference to Eve’s act, locating both the first woman and man’s individual transgressions onto the woman alone.2
The Eve of Genesis 1-5 is an image-bearer of God, a helper, a wife, and a mother. In Genesis 3, although prompted by the serpent, her decision to eat from the tree arises from her reasoned judgement of its value (‘she saw that it was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise’) and her passing the fruit to Adam is described plainly, with no indication of seduction on her part.3 So how has she come to be associated with temptation and sexuality, and to be imagined as the foremother of feminine wiles? Early Church Fathers seized upon Eve’s central role in the scene of Genesis 3 to conclude that she was the reason for man’s sin, emphasising her body and sexuality as the source of this evil. Addressing women, Tertullian famously wrote ‘You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree’ while Augustine suggested Eve’s body to be the site of human carnality.4 Their writings were widely influential in the early modern conception of Eve and women, thus Renaissance paintings depicting the Fall such as Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s The Fall of Man and Titian’s The Fall of Man often portrayed an unashamed Eve positioned towards the serpent and handing Adam an apple, and a horrified Adam trying to prevent her from taking the fruit or standing away from Eve in indifference.5 It is this narrative of Eve as seductress that has dominated the collective imagination and that is regularly conjured up when we picture the figure of Eve.
Ansel Elkins’ poem imagines Eve slightly differently. Written in 2012 and published in 2015, at the height of a feminist movement characterised by women’s reclamation of historically demonised aspects of themselves — their sexuality in particular — Elkins’ Eve is undoubtedly seductive and destructive but she is also vulnerable. Katie Edwards writes that ‘From the late 1990s to very recently Eve has been represented as the ultimate postfeminist icon of sexual power’, noting that due to the emergence of a feminist stance that views sexuality as liberating rather than shameful, women are encouraged to identify with Eve and aspire to the liberation that comes with self-sexualisation.6 Elkins’ poem follows this tradition of female-authored hypersexual Eves seemingly in celebration of the allure of the female body, evidenced by Elkins’ designation of the poem as an ‘ode to sex, desire, rebellion, and so-called fallen women’.7 ‘Autobiography of Eve’ therefore presents us with an eroticised and knowing Eve who is more brazen than the Eve of Genesis 3.
‘Autobiography of Eve’ depicts Eve boldly crossing the border between Paradise and Earth and walking into what she calls ‘freedom’ (l. 16). Elkins evokes the raw sexuality signalled by Eve’s nudity in Genesis 3 by beginning the poem with the words ‘Wearing nothing’ (l. 1). While in the biblical account this is a more innocent sexuality, given that the first couple are not yet aware of the implications of their nakedness, Elkins emphasises the sexual awareness of her Eve through her snakeskin boots. The decision to fashion a covering of some kind for her body suggests knowledge of the shamefulness of nudity but rather than conforming to this shame and covering her breasts or genitals as the couple do in Genesis 3.7 when they make loincloths, Eve instead covers her feet. The status of snakeskin as a symbol of trendiness in women’s fashion indicates her worldliness, which in itself suggests considerable sexual knowledge. As well as signalling sexuality, the fact that she is wearing the snake on her feet implies dominance and imbues Eve with a strength she doesn’t possess in Genesis 3 through the implication that she has wrestled with the serpent and subdued it to her rule.
The subjugation of the snake in this way (for the functional purpose of protecting her feet) is reminiscent of God’s giving Adam and Eve equal dominion over animals in Genesis 1 and the punishment of enmity between the woman and serpents in Genesis 3.8 However, by having Eve appropriate the serpent for an additional, aesthetic purpose, Elkins builds on the foundation of Eve as a sex symbol laid by feminist re-readings of the story, further sexualising her. Edwards notes that advertisements that portray Adam as submissive or docile illustrate ‘the power of female sexuality to strip the male of his traditional role of dominance’.9 This is only furthered by Adam’s absence in Elkins’ poem as the relationship between Eve’s sexuality and the subjugation of the serpent – all without the man from whose body she was created – constructs Eve’s as a ‘sexuality not just unfettered by men but [a] sexuality that dominates’.10 By beginning the poem in this way, Elkins constructs an Eve that is unashamedly hypersexual and dominant, more so than the Eve of Genesis 3.
Elkins also amplifies Eve’s rebelliousness in Genesis by attributing to her traits associated with the serpent in Genesis 3. By not naming Eden but referring to it only as ‘that old kingdom’ (l. 3) which carries connotations of staleness and redundancy in opposition to the freshness of a ‘new unknown’ (l. 4), and by omitting God from the narrative completely, Eve illustrates her contempt for God’s created order as the serpent did in opposing God’s word in favour of its own desires. This is highlighted by the last word of the poem being ‘freedom‘ (l. 16), which characterises the entirety of God’s order as a prison. Additionally, the motif of fire created by words such as ‘blazed’ (l. 2), ‘flaming’ (l. 5), and ‘burning’ (l. 6) signals the destructiveness of her actions and suggests pride in her disobedience. This, in its implication of deliberate sinfulness, is a deviation from the innocent curiosity that drives Eve’s transgression in the biblical account.
Most significantly, rather than being tempted by the serpent’s cunning words as she is in Genesis, in the poem Eve is instead lured by her own voice to honour an already present rebellious spirit; she is her own temptation. The presence of two Eves then — one narrating her walk away from God, and one ‘singing… from across the forbidden | side’ (ll. 11-12) — presents Eve as both duplicitous and seductive, reminiscent of the serpent’s duplicity in knowing the true command given by God but misrepresenting it. This seductiveness is furthered by the image of the second Eve singing to the primary Eve, which is evocative of the sirens of Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths with their songs. By presenting Eve as serpentine in these ways, Elkins overturns Eve’s innocence in Genesis, enhancing the feminist reading of Eve as a formidable woman.
Elkins crucially gives her Eve an agency that the biblical Eve lacks by presenting the poem as an autobiography. While Eve has autonomy in Genesis 3, she lacks the capacity to exert power, a power which the poem’s Eve exhibits in being able to pen her own narrative. Eve’s literacy and her knowledge of representations of herself throughout history, demonstrated by her corrective statement ‘Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.’ (l. 14), again hints at an experience of life that contrasts with the inexperience and naivety of the biblical Eve. By eliminating the tree of knowledge from Eve’s narration, Elkins also denies the possibility that Eve’s knowledge could have originated from God’s wisdom, suggesting that it came from Eve herself. This is highlighted by the repetition of personal pronouns throughout the poem, particularly noticeable in the sequence describing her seduction into the forbidden land by her other self (‘I heard… | my own voice | singing to me’ (ll. 9-11)). By ending the poem with the lines ‘I did not fall from grace. || I leapt | to freedom’ (ll. 14-16), Elkins’ Eve signals the superiority of her narrative because while ‘fall’ has connotations of weakness and carelessness, ‘leapt’ indicates power.
Privileging her version of events — the one that envisions the Fall not as fall but as leap — reinforces her agency by metaphorically ousting all prior imaginings of Eve from the privileged position they hold in our psyches and replacing them with her retelling instead. On the role of the viewer in constructing Eve from fashion magazine adverts, Shelly Colette observes that because the images typically depict a single event, ‘the reader is required to supply the narrative plot herself’.11 Although there are narrative gaps in the poem, an important departure that Elkins makes from many other depictions of Eve is that hers claims ownership of the ‘truth’ of Eve because of the authority given by the label autobiography. This means that while we are indeed ‘seduced by Eve’s seductiveness into reconstructing a new story from an old fabula’, rather than this arising from our imagination, the source is purportedly Eve herself and by doing this, Elkins assigns complete sovereignty to Eve’s voice.12
Although the woman of the poem is recognisably Eve, very little of the Eve of Genesis 1-5 remains in Ansel Elkins’ imagining of Eve in ‘Autobiography of Eve’. Only the allusion to the snake, the reference to Paradise and the phrase ‘fall from grace’ explicitly locate the poem as rooted in Genesis 3. That we are able to immediately see Eve in a description of a daring, sexualised woman, and strongly identify what could merely be an incidental journey as the Fall of Man therefore demonstrates the extent to which representations of Eve that centre her sexuality and suggest innate rebelliousness in her are imbedded in our conception of her. While the biblical Eve is transgressive, Elkins’ Eve is much more so, seeming to embrace her departure from the established rule. That Elkins presents her poem as autobiographical causes us to return to Genesis 3 with suspicion. We are seduced by Eve’s sexuality and her power in the poem into believing her claim on truth and are thus inclined to dismiss the aspects of the biblical account of Eve that stand in opposition to Elkins’ portrayal of her. Because Elkins’ Eve is so incongruous with the unassuming and reticent Eve of the Bible, her poem encourages us to think of the biblical Eve as a patriarchal fantasy of woman — submissive and essentially surplus to man but of paramount importance in matters of non-compliance. We therefore return to Genesis viewing Eve as both a victim of patriarchal remodelling and a fierce opponent in challenging the authority of the Bible and all its subsequent handlers.
Bibliography:
Colette, Shelly, ‘Eroticizing Eve: A Narrative Analysis of Eve Images in Fashion Magazine Advertising’ in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 31 (2015), 5-24
Edwards, K., ‘Bad Girls Sell Well: The Commodification of Eve in Postfeminist Consumerism’ in Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012) pp. 64-126
Edwards, K. ‘Sex and the garden: representations of Eve in postfeminist popular culture’ (published doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008)
Elkins, Ansel, ‘Autobiography of Eve’ in Blue Yodel (Yale University Press: 2015), p. 10
Elkins, Ansel, Autobiography of Eve, Webpage, (2015) <https://poets.org/poem/autobiography-eve> [accessed 24 April 2022]
Genesis 1-5, New Revised Standard Version
Kvam, Kristen E., Schearing, Linda S., Ziegler, Valarie H., ‘Early Christian Interpretations’ in Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 108-155
Sanders, Theresa, Approaching Eden: Adam and Eve in Popular Culture, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009)
Titian, The Fall of Man, Web Page, (2022) <https://www.wikiart.org/en/titian/the-fall-of-man-1570> [accessed 24 April 2022]
van Aelst, Pieter Coecke, The Fall of Man, Webpage, (2022) <https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/explore-the-collection/501-550/the-fall-of-man/ > [accessed 24 April 2022]
- Ansel Elkins, ‘Autobiography of Eve’ in Blue Yodel (Yale University Press, 2015), p.10.
↩︎ - Katie Edwards, ‘Sex and the garden: representations of Eve in postfeminist popular culture’ (published doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, 2008).
↩︎ - Genesis 3.6, NRSV
↩︎ - Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler, ‘Early Christian Interpretations (50-450 ce)’ in Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 132, 149.
↩︎ - Pieter Coeke van Aelst, The Fall of Man (c.1520-30); Titian, The Fall of Man (c.1550).
↩︎ - Katie Edwards, Admen and Eve: The Bible in Contemporary Advertising, (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), p. 92.
↩︎ - Ansel Elkins, Autobiography of Eve, Webpage, (2015) <https://poets.org/poem/autobiography-eve> [accessed 24 April 2022].
↩︎ - Genesis 1.28; 3.15, NRSV.
↩︎ - Edwards, ‘Sex and the garden’, p. 16.
↩︎ - Edwards, ‘Sex and the garden’, p. 27.
↩︎ - Shelly Colette, ‘Eroticizing Eve: A Narrative Analysis of Eve Images in Fashion Magazine Advertising’ in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, (Indiana University Press), 31 (2015), 19.
↩︎ - Colette, ‘Eroticizing Eve’, 20. ↩︎
