Paradise and Storytelling: Interconnecting Gender, Motif, and Narrative Structure

In "Bluebeard's Daughters: Pretexts for Pre-Texts," Jane Marcus observes that storytelling and reading "remain unquestioned as the marks of [being human]" (21). Because being human occurs in two genders, storytelling and reading are, she asserts, gendered activities. Men's stories, she suggests, tend toward "blood narratives of adventure and quest," while women write "milk narratives" that trace the fluid connections of women's experiences from mothers to daughters (27; see also Cixous 20; Irigaray 112-13; and Lanser, "Sexing the Narrative" 87-88).

Narratives centered on the loss, search, discovery, and creation of paradise offer an unparalleled opportunity to study this postulated relationship between gendered storytelling and narrative structure. Interestingly, fiction and paradise share the same original meaning. Fiction can be traced to the Latin verb fingere, to form or mold (see Lausberg 220, para. 398; 482, para. 983). The word paradise derives from two Old Persian roots, pairi (around) and diz (to shape or mold). It first designated the Persian king's enclosed park or garden, a place of perfect happiness. Theology and mythology moved the site of ineffable bliss to the beginning or end of human history and gave it various names: Eden, the biblical earthly garden of delights; Heaven, or the Celestial City promised to believers after death; the classical Elysium, or the Isles of the Blest, the abode of the heroes of Greek mythology; Arcadia, the fictive pastoral landscape in the Peloponnesian mountains in Greece; and the Golden Age lost by human greed. Literature has integrated these diverse traditions into a single motif that is instantly recognizable through such common features as green trees and grass, gentle hills or steep mountains, colorful flowers, pure water, blue skies, balmy breezes, proximity to the divinity/divinities, joy, peace, harmony, and freedom from fear, work, strife, want, disease, and death. ¹ Through its recurrence, variation, and intra- and intertextual linking capacity, the motif transforms a mythical, static vision of bliss into a vibrant narrative unit that actively engages the storyteller's intent. As a narrative unit, the motif embodies successively—or occasionally simultaneously—Bremond's notions of "agent" and "motivation" (174, 187), Brooks's concept of narration as an expression of desire (61), Deleuze and Guattari's paradigm of the rhizome (19-36), and Hanne's nodal point where "the threads of narrative join and divide" (39), and is a vehicle for Pavel's concept of "ontological fusions" (138), Prince's "kernel narrative" (83), and Todorov's "narrative filters" (177). This essay, however, specifically examines the transformation of the motif's narratological functions when stories about paradise shift from men's tales of adventure and quest to women's fiction centered on complex, fluid interconnections. A small number of texts have been selected from the vast literature of paradise from antiquity to the present to illustrate this shift. Readers are encouraged to add their own examples.

Interconnections between the Paradise Motif and Masculine Narratives of Adventure and Quest

In order to trace this transformation, it is necessary to begin with the motif's traditional narratological roles. Its earliest appearances occur in tales of the quest for a remote, inaccessible paradise. ² Despite varied intentions, settings, and genres, these narrations exhibit two common characteristics: they integrate a male-initiated adventure and quest with the longing for paradisal bliss, and they are all written by men for a predominantly male audience. For the "other gender," these two traits have profound consequences. First, with the exception of the imitative Christiana in Bunyan's sequence to The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to the Next, women questers are noticeably absent in these texts. Instead, the feminine is identified as the paradisal landscape itself. As object of the quest, paradise in these narratives frequently exhibits such traditional feminine attributes as beauty, grace, purity, peace, and love. ³ It also reacts like a woman to male sexual advances by either refusing penetration, acquiescing by gradually opening itself to the quester, or in imitation...