Eden Revisited: Re-visions of the Garden in Astell's Serious Proposal, Scott's Millenium Hall, and Graffigny's Lettres d'une péruvienne

Eden Revisited: Re-visions of the Garden in Astell's Serious Proposal, Scott's Millenium Hall, and Graffigny's Lettres d'une péruvienne J. David Macey, Jr Could our first father, at his toilsome plough, Thorns in his path, and labour on his brow, Clothed only in a rude unpolished skin, Could he a vain, fantastic nymph have seen, In all her airs, in all her antic graces, Her various fashions, and more various faces; How had it posed that skill, which late assigned Just appellations to each several kind, A right idea of the sight to frame; T' have guessed from what new element she came, T' have hit the wavering form, or given this thing a name!1 In her poem "Adam Posed" (1709), Anne Finch imagines "a vain, fantastic nymph" who intrudes on the biblical creation narrative to confront humanity's "first father" with an apparently insoluble problem. Neither bone of Adam's bone nor flesh of his flesh, this Protean figure of woman challenges the interpretive mastery that he asserts through the imposition of names. "How had it posed that skill," Finch reflects, "T' have guessed from what new element she came, / T' have hit the 1 Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, "Adam Posed," in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An OxfordAnthology, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 12. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 2, January 1997 162 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION wavering form, or given this thing a name."2 Finch has powerful reasons for wishing to revise the biblical narrative. Contemporary exegesis emphasized Eve's subordination to Adam, insisting that woman was created from and for man, and it assigned woman primarily responsibility for the Fall.3 Finch "poses" this tradition by fashioning a second Eve not from male flesh and blood but from the fabric of female imagination . Finch's nymph resists Adam's effort to assign her a name and place in the terrestrial hierarchy over which he, even in his fallen state, presides . Finch's fantastic creature is not made to serve man's needs, and her presence compels Adam to acknowledge the limits of his understanding and authority. Finch succeeds in "posing" Adam and succeeding generations of patriarchal readers because she enters into a creative relationship with a canonical text. She rewrites the familiar story told in the first three chapters of Genesis by introducing a new character, one drawn not from Christian but from Greco-Roman mythology. Her nymph disrupts the process of naming and interpretation begun by Adam and continued by the philosophers, theologians, and exegetes of Finch's own time by exposing the inability of patriarchal discourse to assimilate the products of the female imagination. Finch's strategy is paradigmatic. Her willingness to play with one of her society's sacred stories, infusing it with new meaning by introducing alien and incongruous elements, transforms a story about the authority of male language and the male intellect into a new, emancipatory myth about the power of female fancy. Finch is not alone in her desire to revise the biblical creation narrative . The scriptural account of Adam and Eve's life in Paradise offers an image of human society in an ideal, prelapsarian state, and it has been invoked repeatedly to naturalize cultural practices including heterosexual monogamy.4 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Mary Astell and Sarah Robinson Scott in England and Françoise de Graffigny in France "posed" patriarchal mythology in an effort to denaturalize heterosexual marriage. The three authors, working in different genres and 2 Finch uses the verb "to pose" in the now obsolete sense of "to place in a difficulty with a question or problem; to puzzle, confuse, perplex, nonplus" OED 2. I have adopted this usage in my discussion of Finch's poem. 3 For a concise statement of the "subordinationist" interpretation of Eve's role in the creation narrative, see James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age ofMilton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 96-97. 4 Turner documents the evolution of an ideology of "Paradisal" marriage in seventeenth-century England in which Adam and Eve's prelapsarian "marriage" was "transformed...