A Genesis of Misogyny

The enduring legacy of Adam and Eve

The story of Adam and Eve might seem benign at this point in human history. More fairy tale than religious canon. The Judeo-Christian creation myth is, after all, exceptionally difficult to align with widely-accepted beliefs in the blob that crawled out of the ocean and started a chain of evolution that led to the glorious beings we are today.

Photo by Andy Bodemer on Unsplash

But it’s a narrative that crops up over and over again in my teaching of English Literature. Direct references to Adam and Eve feature in abundance in traditional and modern texts alike, and the tale has been a foundation for new stories throughout the history of English Literature - from John Milton’s (1667) Paradise Lost to modern takes such as Catherynne M. Valente’s (2021) Comfort Me with Apples.

The thing that continues to surprise me is that I rarely have to explain the story of Adam and Eve to students - at least, not the basics. Even year 7 learners (11-year-olds) arrive at secondary school with a rudimentary understanding of it. When it’s becoming ever more difficult to engage young people with reading; when not a single GCSE student starts the course with the knowledge that Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are (spoiler alert) the same person; the story of Adam and Eve somehow lives rent-free in all of our heads.

Further than merely enduring, the story of Adam and Eve is one that is woven into the fabric of our culture. Its depiction of woman as sinner, as temptress, as catalyst for the fall of mankind, is an insidious archetype that still persists.

Eve is Lady Macbeth - chastising her husband for his lack of ambition and instructing him to “be the serpent” by murdering his beloved Duncan while he sleeps. Eve is Elektra King in the James Bond thriller, The World Is Not Enough - seductive and seemingly innocent, but ultimately duplicitous and deadly. Eve is Cersei Lannister - using her sexuality and cunning to destroy those who stand in the way of her ascension to the Iron Throne.

Despised or admired, women’s roles in texts and media are often confined to tempter-of-man or equally narrow and one-dimensional archetypes: maternal angel of the home; damsel in distress; virginal maiden.

It’s easy to dismiss this phenomenon as a thing of the past. We have Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie; Frances McDormand’s Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. We have Buffy Summers, for the love of all that is holy and vampire-slaying! All (all!) complex female characters that have multidimensionality, agency and growth.

But at a time when the world seems to be veering away from the progressive ideologies of the early 21st century; when EDI initiatives are being discarded as ‘lefty woke nonsense’; when the UK government has deemed it necessary to publish a strategy to halve violence against women and girls in the next decade - it becomes increasingly important to understand and challenge the roots of our collective cultural misogyny. And acknowledge the power that stories have on our real-world behaviour.

The oppression of women undoubtedly predates the writing of the Book of Genesis and Adam and Eve. Patriarchal societies and practices have existed for thousands of years. But the legacy of pervasive and influential stories such as this, especially those enshrined in religious doctrine, have provided justification, implicit or otherwise, for the continued mistreatment and subjugation of women.

Strikingly similar stories crop up in different theologies. From ancient Greek mythology, the story of Pandora’s Box (nee Jar) is in essence the same as that of Adam and Eve: woman with very little else to do is given an item that she is told not to touch → curiosity gets the better of woman and she touches forbidden item → literally all the terrible things in all of existence are imposed upon the world and it’s all the fault of that pesky lady.

Symbols of female sexuality - fruit; a jar; a box - make for convenient transmutation of both myths into morality tales warning of the dangers of female sexual liberation. The moral of these stories? If we do not control women - their desires and urges - they will lead to the downfall of all mankind.

It’s difficult not to see how all of this has played out in relatively modern history. How it continues to play out. Women confined to the domestic sphere, their sexual purity of paramount importance until such a day as they are gifted from father to husband - a husband whose previous and continued sexual purity/loyalty is of much less significance. Uncooperative women labelled as witches; educated women as unmarriable; sexually-liberated women as sluts.

Belief in the moral of the Adam and Eve story is problematic. But equally problematic and dangerous is the dismissal of it - of its intent and its effect. When these kinds of enduring and pervasive tales crop up, it is incumbent on educators, parents, writers, readers to explore the damage that has been done by them. To challenge and subvert the assumptions about women that they assert. To treat them not simply as early farfetched attempts to make sense of the world and existence, but as stories that have had a profound and lasting impact on the way we treat one another.