WITHOUT THE CORE.

Eve
A Biography
Pamela Norris
New York University Press, $35, 496 pp.

The first woman became the "blueprint for Woman, an explanation of her character and possibilities," writes the English critic Pamela Norris. That blueprint, Norris judges, is one of woeful subordination: "Ideas about male and female sexuality and the balance of power between the sexes derive from, one might say have been contaminated by, the prescriptions for human behavior formulated in the first centuries after Christ's death....Eve/ Woman stands accused of vanity, moral weakness, and sexual frailty, while Adam/Man's role in the transaction can be summarized by the familiar defense, 'She led him on.'"

Eve is divided into two sections. The first, "The Making of Bad Reputation," is a survey of the commentaries on the Genesis story, accompanied by accounts that illustrate how prescriptive notions of gender evolved with the rise of Christianity. The second, "Fantasies of Eve," looks at the way in which the tradition informed the imaginations of male and female artists from ancient times to the present-with female writers in contemporary works offering subversive retellings of the myth.

The book is well illustrated, and Norris is very well informed, easy to read, and extraordinarily unpolemical. Her range is impressive: ancient narratives and modern novels are deftly summarized, and Norris finds her way easily through the theological debates and offers allusions to a myriad of writers, critics, and painters. This is a very literary work with illustrative and thematic quotations from standard and non- traditional authors on virtually every page. Yet the text is neither dense nor rebarbative, and the author provides summaries of the argument as she proceeds from stage to stage. One could say the only surprise in the work is the lack of surprise, both in the indictment, never pushed too hard, of male privilege, and in the matter-of-fact way in which a tradition shaped fundamentally by the Christian church is now seen to exist wholly apart from religious questions of any sort.

The genial tone and resolutely unreligious perspective do, however, produce a certain leveling effect. For example, an account of the Cupid and Psyche myth (and the analogies to the Fall it provides) exists on the same plane with that of Augustine's struggles with the origin of evil in The City of God. Norris's retelling of the negative characterization of Woman throughout midrash and early Christian commentaries is unblinking, but she is gracious enough to see the writers as "respectable theologians, weighed down by scholarship and doctrinal responsibility, [registering that] the Paradise of youthful sexuality had indeed been lost forever." The context of the times provides understanding. Men are more blind than to be blamed. In that light, "The Terrible Flesh" may be Norris's best chapter. Here is the measured stance she takes: "It is tempting, when dealing with the attitude of the early church to Adam and Eve, to apply a pick-and-mix approach-to put in a thumb and pull out the ripe plums of misogyny, the damning phrase or polemical statement that seems to confirm wholesale prejudice against women, and in particular a deep suspicion of female sexuality. But the situation was more complex than such an approach would imply."

Norris reads Paul and Augustine well and, drawing on the work of Peter Brown and other scholars, indicates the particular attractions for women of virginity. The subsequent treatment of these themes in "Fantasies of Eve" takes up, among other re-embodiments of Eve, the Virgin Mary. Norris's prefacing remark, that in Mary "women were pledged to an ideal of behavior they could never realize....It seems a curious, malignant, and ridiculous sentence," suggests a lack of sympathy for the material that is generally absent in the rest of her book, but once again reveals certain basic presuppositions. We follow Norris through perceptive readings of works scattered throughout the canon, Milton, Christine de Pizan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anita Brookner....(But why no Wife of Bath? Surely this is a strange omission.) She ranges widely and reads well. Again her plot summaries often untangle in illuminating ways, the intertwining of the myth of Adam and Eve and their contemporary settings. She does a reader service in pushing the analysis as deftly as she does.

According to Norris, the contemporary goal for woman emerging out of the story of the Fall is "to have knowledge and the garden." Under the tutelage of this updated Eve, women can consider "the difficult choices and compromises of adult life, the requirement to balance exploration and individuation with social and family demands." The concluding chapters that allow Norris's Eve to throw off the yoke of traditional interpretation point to the full expression of women's sexuality and creativity without the stigma of temptation or Original Sin.

This is a thoroughly secular book, and its most overt judgments are essentially aesthetic. The moral subtext is enlightened liberation in a strictly material world. There is no intersection of the timeless with time nor does the story of Eve and her daughters find resonance in sacrament. What a peculiar feeling it is to end a book whose very weight of written and iconographic evidence points to a devotional Christian tradition that militates against the argument. Ironically, at least for Christian readers, the lack of stridency in Pamela Norris's analysis is built on an assurance of that tradition's irrelevance; there is no belief in an order external to the self, transcendent, and shepherded as opposed to merely enjoined by the church. As Commonweal's recent discussion of Catholic liberalism has underscored (November 19, 1999), the sponsa Christi has not "articulated a broadly persuasive vision of women's roles within and without the church." This "biography" of Eve, in its deracinated analysis of the tradition, makes the need for articulation seem that much more acute.

Edward T. Wheeler is dean of faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.