Eve's Fate: A beautiful woman who is seen as a bad girl, a prejudice in a patriarchal society |? @art Zhang Xiaoyu
"Kill Eve"
If you've watched the British drama Kill Eve, you may notice that Eve is in the poster of the second season holding an apple in her hand, and at the beginning of the plot, the writers constantly use the apple to hint... The forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve once stole was an apple, and it happened that Eve had the same name as Eve.
Why does the show mention the oldest story in the Bible and this symbolic woman?
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According to the creation story in the Book of Genesis, the first woman in the West, Eve, was responsible for the "fall of man." When she stole the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, humanity was saddled with original sin. Due to her misconduct and eccentric performance, Eve was filled with dramatic tension and became one of the most portrayed women in Western art history. She is a complex archetype of desire and original sin, and her story is deeply rooted in the soul of Western civilization and art history.
In this day and age, we can praise female characters who make mistakes in film and television dramas, or opponents who subvert the traditional concept of women. This allows us to re-examine "Eve", the original bad girl, and how to look at this complex image.
First, let's look at whether the symbolic image of Eve originated in the biblical creation story.
In fact, this parable existed before the Hebrew Bible was written. There is evidence that the story of Adam and Eve originated in ancient Babylonian and Mesopotamian mythology. There is also a paradise in Sumerian mythology called Dilmen. Enki, the god of water and wisdom, gluttonously ate all these strange plants in the garden. Mother Earth was furious and cursed him to die. Later, Mother Earth was tempted by the fox and created eight gods to heal Enki's eight viscera respectively. One of the goddesses is called Ning Ji, and the name means "woman from the ribs".
This ancient legend apparently influenced the story of God creating Eve from Adam's ribs in Genesis, but the gender roles were reversed.
The image of Eve has also been likened to dozens of other prehistoric and pagan goddesses, dating back to the Bronze Age, including the goddess Hepat in the Hurit culture, the mother goddess of the Semitic culture, Ashera, and even the ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.
Like Eve, Aphrodite is often depicted in works of art holding an apple in her hand. In the story of the Trial of Parris in Greek mythology, the Trojan prince Parris gave the apple to Aphrodite. Similarly, this woman also has a lot of dog blood plots, not fuel-saving lamps.
Parris wins the beauty Helen as a result, but he doesn't understand his fatal mistake. In this myth, seductive beauty and feminine persuasiveness sparked the Trojan War, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
It is worth noting that these ancient legends reflect the patriarchal era behind them.
In the Parris trial, the apple was finally obtained by Aphrodite.
By today's standards, such stories have a misogynistic flavor. What these narratives have in common is that the root of the blame is often women. Often, this fictitious woman is so dangerously seductive that she convinces men to make terrible and irreversible decisions. Look at these rhetoric: If Paris hadn't been led astray by beauty, would he have started the Trojan War? If Adam hadn't accepted Eve's apple, would he have bitten it?
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For centuries, artists have had their own interpretations of Eve's story.
The most famous portrait of Adam and Eve was created by the German printmaker Dürer during the Renaissance in 1504. Thanks to the adoption of a new medium of printing, Dürer's work soon spread throughout Europe. Thousands of people saw these influential images of Dürer and believed they had witnessed the real situation of Adam and Eve, the first human man and woman.
In Dürer's depiction, the two men stand on the side of the tree of wisdom, like a snake coiled around a branch. The serpent handed the fruit to Eve, while Adam just watched passively. Eve's gesture is subtle and ambiguous—is she ready to eat the forbidden fruit? Or ready to feed Adam?
Part of Lucas Kranak Sr.'s Adam and Eve, Adam scratches his head and looks confused.
The emotion of "accusation and blame" for the bad girl Eve is always inadvertently revealed in the painting -
In 1592, Haarlem created a very similar scene in The Fall of Man, except that the fruit was presented to Eve by a small "snake girl" in human form; at the same time, another famous northern Renaissance painter, Lucas Kranak Sr., in his painting when Eve handed Adam the apple, Adam scratched his head and looked confused; in other 16th-century depictions, even the snake could not be seen in the painting, which meant that the blame was directly on Eve;
Adam seems to be rejecting
In the early 17th century, Joachim Anthonis depicts Eve seemingly pressing the apple directly and forcefully into Adam's hand; John Koenig's version similarly depicts Eve shoving the apple into Adam's hand, in which Eve stands above Adam, a powerful bad woman.
In addition to the biblical creation story, how did "Eve" evolve to represent "a type of woman"?
Jezebel, the wicked wife of King Ahab of Israel
In the popular imagination, Eve's image is a combination of many historical and fictional female protagonists — from the vicious Jezebel and Medea to the scorpion beauties Pandora, Delilah and Salome.
In the Hebrew Bible, Jezebel was the wife of King Ahab of Israel who killed jehovah's prophet and gradually evolved into the modern term "Jezebel," meaning "a vicious woman."
These women, like Eve, are interpreted as seducers, and other negative female stereotypes often conflate this feminine trait with sin. By the 1880s, the literary technique and symbolism of the "snake and scorpion beauty" was often used to refer to a fanatical, seductive, but dangerous woman.
Salome, a woman who loves to hate
All these well-known "misbehaving" women continue to appear in Western art history and literature through the shell of Eve, the "bad girl". This negative stereotype surrounding the image of women seems to have led directly to the long persecution of "witches" in European history – it was always these "Eves" who lured people to make mistakes.
Witch hunts in the Middle Ages
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The negative impact of Eve's story on women is more profound than any other mythological or biblical story. For centuries, the story of creation has been used by the Church and christian society as a whole to justify patriarchal attitudes and the conquest of women.
Ironically, Eve is a contradiction. How could she be both deliberately doing bad things and at the same time being deceived, stupid, and weak-willed? However, Eve's timeless symbolic power continues to permeate contemporary pop culture.
The British drama "Good Omens", the story takes place in the Garden of Eden.
There is also a British drama "Good Omens", which begins by playing the classic Adam and Eve Eden meme, and the magic is that this time Eve is portrayed as a black character. After all, according to mitochondria, the first woman of common ancestor may have come from Africa, and therefore the black-skinned Eve. Or do you want to say that no matter where Eve appears in the world, she will make mistakes?
In order to promote and echo the image of "Bad Girl Eve" in art history, let's go back to "Killing Eve".
The play presents two very different female characters, both borrowing from the image of The Biblical Eve in their own way: Villanella embodies the stereotype of history, a psychologically twisted, sexually aroused, selfish, evil woman who also seduces men with her innocent appearance, and Eve is a disobedient, conflicted woman who is seduced by desires that are not allowed by herself. Above all, the show is ironic — the shameless, unapologetic "bad girls" who laugh at centuries of negative myths about women.
As for Eve's artistic future, it is entirely in the hands of the artist.
What will the next work depicting Eve look like?