Anna Beer - Eve Bites Back: An Alternative History of English Literature

I started by seeking out a different Bible. I felt I knew more than enough about Eve bringing sin and death into the world (she gave me of the tree and I did eat) and the more punitive bits of the Book of Genesis:

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

I was aware of Eves successors, the bloodthirsty Old Testament women (think Artemisia Gentileschis graphic, disturbing painting of Judith slaying Holofernes) or the sexy New Testament ones (think Dan Browns Da Vinci Code s portrayal of Mary Magdalene, sex worker turned Mrs Jesus). And I thought I knew the redemptive Second Eve, the Virgin Mary.

I was looking for something different, a biblical text written by a woman. So I seized on the Book of Esther, excised by the Church Fathers from the biblical canon. It was a mistake. No one has any idea who actually wrote the book, and, if we are being academic, the concepts of a single author or even a definitive text are both pretty useless when considering the murky, complicated origins and transmission of the texts that make up the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. When an author has been suggested, it has been a man, Mordecai, the main character. It might have saved me some time in the remoter corners of biblical scholarship if they had called it the Book of Mordecai.

Looking for Esther the author was a foolish mistake, but thinking about the erasure of womens lives and words in the far distant past was not. How that erasure was achieved, what was said, done and written then, matters now. When the patriarchs (literally, they were patriarchs) wrote their histories of the early Church, two archetypal women were left standing in the ruins. They would dominate literature in English for the next two millennia: Eve and the Virgin Mary. To be honest, if the two hadnt existed, then the patriarchy would have had to invent them. Do be Mary. Dont be Eve.

Eve whose God-given punishment for bringing sin and death into the world was to be placed under Adams rule and to experience pain in childbirth. Eve who was responsible for Adams sin as well as her own. Eve who gave authority to patriarchal commentators to tell women, over and over again, that their essential nature was vile and disgusting, that any attempt to conceal let alone challenge the fundamental truths of their bodies was fraudulent and blasphemous. Put bluntly, as Tertullian the early Christian Father did: women are Eve.

Sometimes, though, Eve fights back. She does so in unexpected ways that dont necessarily fit with our modern ideas of what a woman, let alone a feminist, should do. But simply by putting words together on the page, she takes up battle. And she does so, knowing in one form or another every reason why she should not write, and certainly should not bite.

Here are some of them.

You are physically incapable of being an author.

Medicine and philosophy, astronomy and theology all combined for millennia to insist that the female body is intrinsically faulty, cold, wet, irrational, changeable and above all fallen: unfit for the task of authorship. You can see why people questioned whether Trota of Salerno, a female doctor in eleventh-century Italy, actually wrote a number of texts about diseases and health conditions affecting women. Surely a woman could not possess the intelligence and expertise to have written the works? The obvious first step was to ascribe the works to male authors and the follow-up was to suggest that she never existed at all. Job done.