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., Vanderbilt University
Volume 9, no. 2, January 1997
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
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 wavering form, or given this thing a name.” 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. 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.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Utopia” include:
Sarah Scott and America: Sir George Ellison, The Man of Real Sensibility, and the Squire of Horton
by EVE TAVOR BANNET (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
Utopian Voyeurism: Androgyny and the Language of the Eyes in Haywood’s Love in Excess
by ELIZABETH GARGANO (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
Secretaries of the Interior: Narratorial Collaboration in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall
by WILLIAM H. WANDLESS (ECF 21.2, Winter 2008-9)
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