The Story of Eve (Hardcover)

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Eve: A Biography, by Pamela Norris, is a lively, erudite and accessible story about "history's first bad girl, who carelessly threw away the chance of Paradise". Part I, "The Making of A Bad Reputation", describes Eve's significance in early Jewish and Christian communities. Ancient rabbis considered Eve's primary role to be the "mother of all living", and used her sin as an example of what can happen to women who stray from their childbearing duties. Later Christian readers began the tradition of invoking Eve as the exemplar of sexual temptation--"the Devil's gateway" and "the first deserter of the divine law". Citing many such passages of religious history, Norris argues that the story of Eve "was developed to manipulate and control women". Although Norris's theological thinking is not as subtle as it could be, Eve is no facile feminist screed. The book's second half is particularly strong. In "Fantasies of Eve", Norris considers Eve's literary incarnations in the works of Milton, Hawthorne and Ursula K LeGuin, among others. Moving from Scripture to secular literature, Norris patiently and brilliantly traces the slow and limited evolution of Eve's story into a defence of "the need to challenge boundaries, to make the imaginative leap, however difficult, unpredictable and even dangerous, into a new phase of existence". --Michael Joseph Gross --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
The story of Eve is the story of Everywoman; her brief history in Genesis is where the Western idea of woman began. Three thousand years after the myth was first recorded, women are still, this book argues, grappling with ideas about female sexuality, intellectual inferiority and subordinate domestic status engendered by that ancient source. This work follows Eve's history as it was taken up and rewritten in multiple ways. The effect of these rewritings was to present Eve and her daughters as sexual temptresses whose dangerous influence could be controlled only by obedience to male authority and repeated childbirth. Many of these versions of Eve's stories were written by men and reflect male fears and fantasies about women; others were written by women and offer insight into how it felt to live under the shadow of the first woman. The book traces Eve's evolution, exposes the flimsiness of the case against her and explores some of the fantasies that the idea of Eve has conjured up in the human imagination.

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