The Evolution Of Eves Janet Schlicht

Janet Schlicht

They had to make me into a subversive. It was the only way. Or it wasn’t, but the holy men of the day cleaved to the idea that it was I who condemned us to a loss of innocence and grace. And so my story becomes this: that after Adam and I had been living a blissful life in the garden of Eden for untold millennia, I was tempted into evil by the wily serpent and with one bite of the deep red apple, caused All Mankind to be cast out of the beauty and bounty that was Eden. This is a story that many children hear and learn before they are able to read, and so it is buried deep into their subconscious in a way that will inform their entire lives. My story has been misrepresented. In truth, Adam and I had everything going for us back then. We held each other in deep trust, and we had more than enough food of every kind from the garden. There was a serpent, yes, but we paid him little mind. He wrapped himself around tree limbs, he slithered through tall grasses as snakes are wont to do. And we had apples, deeply luscious apples of which we freely ate. But the holy men needed a story that would be good for telling and retelling. They needed a way to create a fear of God in the swarms of people. They had not so much as a thin papyrus with our story written on it, only the word of mouth from their ancestors and the ancestors before that. They needed to write it down. They needed an origin story. They sat in their dark caves wearing their black robes and thought deeply about it. And the image they kept tripping over as they attempted to write the story was me. My naked story was born in the dark gatherings of their imaginations. Eve, unclothed, nubile, cavorting through an impossible abundance. Their own thoughts created such irresistible desires that they could not concentrate on writing the story. What to do with a woman like me? What to do with women, who aroused always such unholy thoughts. The malign serpent, of course. The forbidden apple. Weakness as a female failing. The story began to write itself, and what could I do about it, timeless as I was, living in a sort of magical reality. Sealed in the scriptures, voiceless and powerless, I became a two-dimensional version of myself for some unknown period of time, a moment being the same as a millennium to 84

me. As generations of children learned of me in this way, there was no way to correct them. The men of the Church paid artists for their depictions of a woman shamed, a woman covering her body with her hands, a woman whose face was twisted by the ugliness of her deed. I had long despaired of regaining my own true form in any meaningful way. I should not have been surprised, then, when the big boys of the Church began to see an urgent need for a better version of me. The architecture of their story about women was resting on just a single support, and they realized that made for a lopsided structure. By this time they were living in opulence and had switched from penitential black robes to red outfits with lacy sleeves made just for them in Brussels. They donned odd hats and marched with scepters to signify their importance. They came up with Mary, of course: virginal, beatific, perfect in every way, giving life without ever succumbing to lust. She was sainted from the very first, painted on puffy white clouds and being assumed into heaven. The tempting curves of her body they swathed in long robes, to try to extinguish the disquieting thrumming in their gorgeous red vestments. At first, I expected that I might detest her. She was, after all, often pictured with an apple in her hand or at her feet. My apple. My power. She got so much attention and she remains the object of so much veneration that I could hardly help being just a dab jealous. But we got to know each other. She is as aware as I am of the façades put in place by those in charge to try to obscure the fact that woman contains multitudes, and that each of us is holy in a way that the men who created us could never begin to comprehend. Mary had been created, venerated, made into countless statues. And still the holy men were filled with a consuming desire. They denied it, of course, professed to love only the lord while under their black robes or their red robes, even in the presence of the flickering candles of the sanctified church, the pulse of their need would not be silenced. Over the ages, as I continued to gather dust in Genesis, men continued to behave badly while I shouldered the blame. They behaved badly even when they believed that Mary was watching them. Not all men, of course. But many, and in many ways both subtle and overt. Girls, young women are subjected to degradation and exploitation: the girl tricked into a life of sexual slavery; the girl surrounded by a group of upstanding young men who will 85

go on to become judges and senators; women of wartime who become spoils going to the victors; women who partners bruise them physically and emotionally. Their bodies and spirits used up, they become twisted, despicable creatures. They are spoiled goods.

The manipulation of my story by those who wrote the books lives on. That is not something that I can change. And of course there is no going back to Eden—too many memories for me, and besides, it’s surely not the same place it once was. I have made myself a life. I salvaged some apple seeds at the time I was banished, and the orchard I planted thrives. I’ve created a small business here in my mythological world, and I employ fifty sisters with picking and selling apples and making my signature cider. Adam visits from time to time; I’m not sure whether he comes to see me or eat my apple pie, but I’m comfortable with whichever is the case. I keep an eye on the disordered lives of women in the larger world, as I believe witnessing has a power of its own. Does the long arc of justice bend, as they say, toward a better life for women? I like to think so, and I see much evidence of it, of strong and capable women who stand up one by one. The deep rootedness of misogyny begins to fray at the edges. Women begin to taste the metaphorical apple, devour its succulence, know it’s magic. They begin to return us to the dream, to the garden in which we are all aspects of the divine. Women are no longer dissolved into anonymity. We see their names, we see their faces, in the news and on social media. Every Eve joins the march with her sisters toward higher ground. There, she joins with people of both genders who call for the casting away of shame, where we are united as humankind in a true Eden, a place of blossoming and bounty. May it be so.